Future of Media

New Media is opinionated about the internet’s infinite scale . It chooses to reject or play with the internet’s scale, opting to be handmade, limited quantity, or geared towards small groups of people who actively choose to receive it. New Media is not something to be fished from a stream, but a sacred pilgrimage one may embark upon.

We enjoy media by ourselves, but we also *use* media to communicate. Am I being spoken to by the piece of media, OR is the media speaking for me? In this era, the latter is increasingly more relevant because of the ability to share the extra context around the media (the fandom). It’s not that the piece of media has to have a particularly salient s... See more

I see two divergent media futures emerging—each based on networks that serve very different groups.

In the first future, our networks serve the technologists who build them, the advertisers that pay for them, and the governments that control them. These networks compete for users in a war for attention by making systems that spit out superficially ... See more

Certain types of media are ideal for stadiums that have influencers at the heart of their activity, and some media forms are better suited to decentralised institutions with many contributors: a megaphone is not a great tool for having everyone’s voice heard, podcasts are not interactive formats, and video-essays are (currently) not produced togeth

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Regardless, what becomes important is the ability for *any* media to find the humans to enjoy it. And so, there’s likely a future inflection point where having more humans on your project is actually beneficial because it means you start off with a higher likelihood of it being shared. If the extreme becomes that we may be able look at anything for... See more

Well, one explanation I liked quite a bit was recently written by Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Mims, who argued that social media isn’t dying, but changing into broadcast media. The majority of the content we see on a daily basis is now made or shared by a small professional class of users, known as the creator economy. Which is making... See more

. Britannica is organized by subjects, Wikipedia by hyperlinks. Britannica is organized in alphabetical order. Wikipedia is a web of references with no beginning or end. Wikipedia is made by the people, for the people. It’s a collective memory machine where knowledge is accessible to everybody with a smartphone

The merging of personalisation and generation represents the ultimate optimisation for media production. Everybody satisfied, all of the time.

But such a simplistic optimisation overlooks the broader implications – those that differentiate entertainment from culture. They inspire a cascade of questions, such as how is human culture changed if we los

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