🌳 predicting the effects of a new medium is hard

Bottled Authors: The Predigital Dream of the Audiobook is a delightful 10 minute read on the beauty of imagination. Set in the late 1800s, the primary goal is to survey the audiobook predictions of folks hearing audio recording technology for the first time. But reading it raised a different question for me: How can we reasonably predict what a brand new medium will do to the media we create with it?

A few thoughts…

1. We often predict that technology will get faster and easier. And we’re usually right.

The portability of recorded audio is a great example of this. Just one year after Edison began his work on phonographs, a journalist announced: “The library of the future will be one which any man can carry under his arm.” This proved to be an impressive, far-reaching prediction. Not just because it came so immediately after the first recordings, but because it would take 50 years to successfully record a full-length book. Even more impressive was the 1883 prediction by University of Minnesota professor Evert Nymanover that called for “whispering machines” in our hats that read books to us.

2. Human nature does not change. Our fundamental motivations and limitations stay the same.

Here’s another prediction from Professor Nymanover in the same essay¹ :

Everyone while sitting in the cars, walking in the streets, reclining on beds and sofas, could be perpetually listening to Adam Smith’s moral sentiments, Draper’s intellectual development, etc., and yet be at the same time talking, resting, working at a carpenter’s bench, dressing, promenading, practicing finger-exercises on the piano, or other instruments, and so forth.

There are multiple reasons this prediction didn’t pan out. And one of them is focus. You can’t practice finger-exercises on the piano and listen to your sister talk about her first day at school at the same time. Similarly, you can’t practice piano and listen to Adam Smith’s moral sentiments at the same time either. The concept of focus does not change.

Similarly, the motivating factors of belonging, status, greed, dopamine, etc. will all stay the same. There’s a reason people don’t spend their days listening to “Adam Smith’s moral sentiments” in line at the DMV: there’s more engaging audio content out there.

3. It’s hard to predict the feedback loop between medium and media.

The article describes a public that took an entertainment source they were used to (books) and mapped it onto the medium of sound. Part of this is the fact that the focus of the article was on audiobooks. But it does suggest the possibility that “medium shapes media” is a difficult concept to absorb. Few, if any, predicted radio shows, auto-tune, or YouTube.²

It’s even easier to see the unpredictable effect of feedback by watching the arc of video content. Being able to record video didn’t mean plays-on-demand. It meant that the shape of theater changed dramatically. We saw movies, which spawned TV shows. We saw America’s Funniest Home Videos which then became YouTube. We saw web series and Vines and now TikToks…the nature of the media we create has changed shape millions of times, both as a reaction to the art that came before but also as a reaction to the tools we create, share, and view the art on.

I don’t know how we can get better at predicting the flywheel, but a few questions we can ask ourselves in a loop come to mind:

“What can I do with this that I couldn’t do before?”
“What might build on top of that?”

For example: Snapchat and TikTok both have powerful creator tools that didn’t exist before. Snapchat allows AR stickers, TikTok allows for cloning, background replacement, etc. If you can add AR stickers that seem more and more lifelike to your work, what might that unlock? Could you start adding AR characters to your online media? Let’s say a digital pet that only appears on Snapchat or TikTok, but becomes a character you can play off of and develop a fan following around? If we’re awash in a world of digital pets, what does that enable?

It’s a great way to generate visions of potential futures, but when it comes to actual predicting, it’s harder. Because going down the chain of:

AR ➡️ AR stickers on Snapchat ➡️ AR pets ➡️ Folks can have an AR pet that appears repeatedly in their content ➡️ AR pet “influencers” sponsoring dog food brands

is like playing a game of telephone with yourself. If the world takes a hard left turn at AR stickers and virtual pets don’t take off, then everything down the chain sounds ludicrous. But, 🗨️ The best way to predict the future is to invent it. So it is still valuable to use this ideation to build and keep an eye out for benchmarks towards your predictions.

What do you think? How can we get better at predicting the effects of medium on media?

Related to:

Krugment is Wrong about the Internet. Again.
Novels can be used to predict geopolitical conflict 5 years in advance
Compounding Crazy: a Packy McCormick piece entirely about how progress is exponential and therefore unpredictable to our linear brains.
Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change covers other metrics you can use to predict technological change. I’d like to cover that in a different blog post, or add that in here.
Blog posts:
- 🌳 NFTs change how we create
- [[❔ How can we predict how a new medium will affect current media]]
- [[❔ What is an example of a medium change that led to a media change]] Updates:
2022-07-29: Added “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change” link above.

Footnote 15 in the article ↩
It’s entirely possible that this article just didn’t cover predictions that didn’t involve audiobooks. This article assumes that such predictions weren’t widespread. Reach out if you know something I don’t. ↩

Every post on this blog is a work in progress. Phrasing may be less than ideal, ideas may not yet be fully thought through. Thank you for watching me grow.