Idioverse's Unstable Ground - AI, McLuhan & Media pt. 6

I've been thinking more about Jeff Gomez's vision of an AI-driven entertainment platform that creates (or co-creates?) custom narrative content from bespoke story worlds tailored to your unique sensibilities and preferences. I've termed this the Idioverse. I've had a nagging skepticism that such a thing would ever survive past its novelty phase and become a culturally relevant media platform, but struggled to articulate why. At some point, I remembered Marshall McLuhan's concept of figure and ground, and that's when it clicked: the idioverse would be a figure floating in the void, with no stable ground.

🌌 Figure and Ground: The Missing Context

 In McLuhan's framework, the figure is the focal point—the immediate content that grabs your attention. The ground is the background, the stable context that gives meaning to the figure. Think of a bright star in the night sky: the star (figure) stands out because of the vast darkness around it (ground).

Traditional media thrives on this dynamic. Shows like Game of Thrones weren’t just popular because of their content; they became cultural phenomena because we all watched, discussed, and debated them together. The shared experience was the ground that gave the figure its cultural weight.

Now, imagine an idioverse where every story is custom-made for you and only you. It might be compelling at first, but eventually, it risks feeling hollow. Why? Because the personalized narrative becomes a figure without a ground—no common cultural touchpoints, no collective discussions, no fandoms built around shared moments. It’s like shouting into the void, with no echo to remind you that someone else heard it.

⚰️ A Tragic Flaw

Consuming even the most brilliantly crafted, custom-made narrative might leave an oddly hollow feeling, like waking from a vivid dream. You can describe it to others, but they won’t truly understand; it’s yours alone, disconnected from any shared reality. That subtle, hard-to-place sense of dissatisfaction would be compounded by the absence of the rich ecosystem that surrounds mass media: fandoms, critics, entertainment websites, and communal conversations. These cultural layers thrive on shared experiences, not isolated ones, and without them, the idioverse’s appeal might fade quickly.

🚀 But What If There’s a Solution?

I've been toying with an idea that not only addresses this issue but could actually create a thrilling new framework for fandom and shared experiences in an AI-driven media landscape. It bridges the gap between hyper-personalized content and collective cultural touchstones. And it's relevant not just to this prophesied uber-platform, but, I think, to the more immediate concerns of procedurally generated content.

I'll tell you about it next time.