Neural Media

Youtube

We’re in a new epoch of media: the Neural Age characterized by “a high dimensional space with hallucinated content for embedded identities”.

That’s a lot to unpack: so the talk starts by contrasting with prior media epochs such as Broadcast Media and Network media. The Broadcast Media age was born out of the new technologies of radio and television. Its characteristics were “centralized space with programmatic content and demographic identities”. Everyone gathers around the same television set watching the same programs at the same time.

Then Network Media comes along. Instead of centralized it’s distributed; instead of programmatic content there’s mimetic content; and instead of demographic identities there’s fractal identities. Everyone’s on their own screen listening to their own filter bubble and distinguishing themselves as much as they can from themselves¹ and hoping to go viral.

What was new to me was that things got weird in between. The Immersive media age was characterized by distributed spaces with experiential content for constructed identities. Avant garde performance art, hippies, and an alluring sense of openness and self-determination seemed to characterize this age. The other epochs were intimately driven by technological improvements in communications; this one was not aside from perhaps the invention of LSD?? I would have listened to an entire talk just about this period.

Given my previous employment I found the connection between the media environment and adtech particularly striking. Broadcast media relied on Nielsen ratings which only allowed sliced by broad demos: hence content reflecting and targetting demographic groups. Then comes Network Media where finer measurements and analytics allow for ever finer slicing of audiences. Finally we’re in the Neural Age where ad tech becomes ever more personalized and predictive: tech advertisers form a powerful yet inscrutable embedding of your behavior and this is seen downstream in identity.

What comes next in this throughline of ever more personalized content? Once we get to the point of generating content specific to each individual person what new frontier is there? This is pure speculation but I wonder if we might go back to the past a little. There is something compelling about a universally shared Broadcast Media experience that in my own lifetime has only really tapped by the Harry Potter and Marvel universes though those are not faring well recently.. Likewise the timing is right for screen-free Immersive Media experiences to really kick off. Or that might just be the chief sin of the modern age: looking to an idealized past instead of looking to the brave new worlds of the ever weirder future.