The Idioverse Cometh - AI, McLuhan & Media pt. 5

☠️ The Metaverse is dead... here comes the Idioverse! 

I've been writing about AI, and in particular an AI-powered platform delivering personalized transmedia stories, from a McLuhan-inspired lens. 

One of the biggest shifts an AI-driven media landscape could bring is the collapse of shared experiences. It's the opposite of the ill-conceived Metaverse in a way, and I'm coining it the Idioverse. 

If AI can generate custom content for every individual, what happens to the stories we experience together?

📺 From Mass Media to Infinite Personalization

For most of modern history, mass media shaped our cultural conversations. The golden age of television had only a few networks—when something big aired, everyone was watching. Even in the streaming era, hits like Game of Thrones still created global moments of shared anticipation and debate.

AI reverses this. Instead of a handful of dominant cultural texts, we get an endless, hyper-personalized media feed. Imagine an AI-generated series in an IP, that is uniquely crafted to your tastes, pacing, device preferences, and emotional sensibility—and watched only by you. If everyone is watching something different, do we lose the ability to talk about stories at all? Would that be the death of online fandoms too?

🔄 McLuhan’s Reversal: From Connection to Isolation

McLuhan observed that when a medium is pushed to its extreme, it flips into its opposite. Mass media expanded shared culture; AI-generated media of this kind, taken to its limit, erases it. If every narrative is tailored, our collective conversation shrinks, hyperfragmented into the many-headed Idioverse. 

But does this mean the end of communal storytelling? Or could it create a reaction?

🛠️ What Comes Next?

If hyper-personalization isolates us, we may see a counter-movement:

🎭 A resurgence of live, communal storytelling (theater, events, interactive experiences)

🤝 New AI tools for co-creation rather than passive consumption

🛠️ A shift from "watching together" to "building together"—fandoms influencing AI-driven narratives in real-time

AI doesn’t just change how we consume stories; it changes how we share them. If we don’t want storytelling to become a lonely experience, we must be deliberate in how we create and connect.