Media, Minds & Machines

The long view

Run the tape from cave walls to ChatGPT and the pattern holds. Writing let us externalize memory and made knowledge feel permanent — and from that one property of immutability we eventually got citation, copyright, and the very idea of plagiarism. Print helped catalyze the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. Radio and cinema changed the shape of public life; television, as Postman warned, made entertainment the natural format for everything, politics included. The internet and social media handed everyone a printing press, and with it the attention economy, the echo chamber, and meme politics. Each new medium changed not just what we could say but how we think.

AI, the deepest case

Generative AI is only the latest place these questions land. It shares the generative, interactive, adaptive, ubiquitous, and multimodal attributes that make any cultural technology powerful (Mishra, Warr & Islam, 2023) — but it adds one property of its own: it is mutable where print was fixed. And, most disorienting of all, it feels like a someone. Our Stone Age minds are built to find agency wherever something answers back — beavers will build a dam over a loudspeaker playing the sound of running water; we confide in a chatbot. Anthropomorphism is simply AI’s version of that older, wider pattern — one instance, not the whole story.

The close

Which is why I’ve come to believe real literacy, in any age, has two halves: reading the nature of the medium, and reading our own minds — the instincts and biases it plays on. To thine own mind be true. The hardest thing to interpret has never been the technology. It’s ourselves.