Predicting The Future Of Entertainment
/The last decade has seen significant overturns in the entertainment industry. The competing and sometimes complementary impacts of streaming, immersive technology, the pandemic, strikes, burgeoning international markets, video games, and shifting cultural values have rocked the once-steady industry in every conceivable direction.
And that’s the last decade. That’s 10 years on earth. What will the next 10, 20, or 100 years look like? This imaginative speculation is the purview of “futurism,” a practice that extrapolates insights from current signals to determine long-range future trends. This article takes inspiration (and a couple of pull quotes) from prominent futurist.com speaker Nikolas Badminton to try and imagine the future of entertainment.
Immersion, Experiential Media, and the Metaverse
In a sense, you can view the history of entertainment as a gradual movement toward experiential immersion. The limits of oral tradition gave way to written technology; books gave way to photographs; photographs collated to create videos and movies. The next logical step in the sequence is for movies to become fully immersive.
The technology exists. AR and VR are becoming less expensive to scale with each passing year. And the Metaverse has its sights on transforming our understanding of media consumption. In 50 years, we could see entertainment as a shared, immersive digital hub but futurist Nikolas Badminton cautions that we need to “challenge the hype and watch the evolution of this (cyber) space” to understand how broader socio-economic and demographic megatrends affect it.
Gamification
Part and parcel of immersion is gamification. After all, what is a game except an immersive experience rooted in audience agency?
According to Pew Research, several experts and analysts predict that gamification and game-like elements will pervade numerous corners of our future lives, entertainment included. It isn’t far-fetched to posit that a significant share of future stories will be told with the aid of audience participation, interaction, and – through AI-powered multi-branching narratives – audience authorship.
Diverse Perspectives and Narratives
The world is becoming increasingly diverse by nearly every metric: cultural, racial, neurologically (identified), and in terms of expressed gender and sexual orientation. While some pundits worry that this diversification could spur an increase in nativist thinking or segregation, others choose to imagine a brighter future.
We’ve seen strides in representation in the entertainment industry over the last decade, albeit modest strides. But we can see more. In the future, expect to see the entire organizational pyramid (not just creatives) in the entertainment industry embody and express the spectrum of human experience.
AI and Humans
With the WGA strikes fresh in the headlines and the skyrocketing success of ChatGPT, many wonder about the future. Not just the future of the entertainment industry, but the future of art and cultural production as a whole.
But doesn’t AI just reaffirm the dominant trends and biases in art? Nikolas Badminton doesn’t think so, telling the Evening Standard that “Generative AI can help reduce bias. By using deep learning algorithms to generate new content, generative AI can help reduce the influence of human bias on the content that is created.”
Predictions in this space are tricky. One can easily imagine that the role of creators, artists and storytellers will continue, albeit in a “choreographer’s” or “curator’s” role. Similarly, AI and machine learning may seize some of the storytelling clout in the entertainment industry – but just like craft artisans in the 20th Century, there will still be a market for bespoke human products.
All we do is extrapolate futures from the present we currently have. That said, it’s interesting to think where entertainment might find itself in 50 or 100 years. One thing is for sure: our human need for stories and experiences will continue.
