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While the metaverse hype has cooled, AR glasses are inevitable. Imagine walking down the street while a podcast appears as a floating avatar next to you, or watching a baseball game where live stats and player bios hover over the field. Popular media will escape the rectangle of the phone and overlay onto the physical world.

One of the defining characteristics of modern popular media is the erasure of the line between consumer and creator. This is "participatory culture."

Consider the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The films themselves are the primary entertainment content, but the surrounding ecosystem of Reddit theories, reaction videos on YouTube, fan edits on Twitter, and cosplay on Instagram constitutes a massive secondary media landscape. Watching "Avengers: Endgame" is only 50% of the experience; the other 50% is participating in the online discourse about it. xxxsonacom top

This shifts the power dynamic. Studios no longer just write stories; they write "lore"—dense, sprawling mythologies designed to be dissected, memed, and argued over. The hit show "Yellowjackets" or the video game "Five Nights at Freddy’s" succeeds not just on narrative quality, but on its "re-watchability" and its ability to generate endless fan speculation.

For the last decade, the goal of technology has been to remove "friction." Tech companies defined friction as anything that slowed you down: turning a page, tuning a radio dial, or waiting for a photo to develop. While the metaverse hype has cooled, AR glasses

But in removing friction, we removed feeling.

Neuroscientists have found that the tactile feedback of the physical world creates stronger memory imprints than digital interactions. When you type an email, you are pressing the same glass surface for every letter. The sensation is uniform and forgettable. When you write a letter by hand, the scratch of the pen, the texture of the paper, and the resistance of the ink engage multiple sensory channels. The message becomes physical; it becomes real. One of the defining characteristics of modern popular

This explains the resurgence of the vinyl record. By all objective metrics, vinyl is inferior to digital streaming. It pops, it crackles, and you have to physically get up to flip the side. Yet, in 2023, vinyl records outsold CDs for the first time in decades.

Why? Because the imperfection is the point. The crackle is the sound of human effort. It forces you to listen to an album as a complete piece of art, rather than a skip-able data file.