This is super basic, but maybe it’s helpful?

Think about the history of media communication, aside from face-to-face physical speech. Historically, it’s been a small percentage of people were functionally literate, let alone anything like the education that can come with use of that literacy. But it’s been an even tinier fraction that produced that media: published authors or photographers or recording artists or actors or radio play directors or news reporters or filmmakers. You get the point. Right up through the eras of broadcast and cable television and into the early days of the internet.

Then, in the 2000s, something different happened. Very quickly, billions of people gained the capacity to communicate via media with billions of other people. This was the point of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (2008) and dozens of other books, op-eds and think pieces. That had never happened before in human history.

Hilarity ensued.

Coming up to the pandemic we were engaged in this activity, this wholly novel activity in human experience. We were doing it 24/7 with our phones. The result has, apparently, been mental illness, social disruptions, weakened democracies, and a fundamental breakdown in our capacity to deliberate, negotiate, and communicate. And then we had the pandemic and it felt like social media and digital communication were all that we had.

On the whole, I’m going to call that an unpleasant experience that only exacerbated the conditions of the previous decade.

And now, from the corporations who brought you all that….. AI!

So there’s something to study there. It turns out those digital media ecologies reflect billions of people doing stuff, and even more billions of machines responding. We can and do study this from the angles of psychology, sociology and other social sciences, but also from the humanities where it is about bringing our philosophical, theoretical, critical, scholarly methods to bear on this “new” zone of human experience. But there’s something else. While the engineers build these technologies, we instruct in their use in the public sphere. From aesthetics and poetics to rhetorics, the arts and humanities develop the capacities for digital media communications (or it would make sense for them to do so).

But the thing is that we don’t really. Or at least the cornerstone disciplines of the arts and the humanities don’t really claim this space as they do others. They study literature, history, and art. Of course they do. It’s what it says on the tin. So who would say, as history would say it studies history, that they study this whole new world of media-human experience? Media studies? Sure, certainly some part of media studies does this, as do digital rhetoricians. There is also the cultural studies of science and technology as a context here. And there are artists working in and experimenting with these media. But we don’t have a strong connection between the expressive potential of digital media arts and the rhetorical situation of the public sphere. That is, we don’t make the link that allows us to develop our expressive capacities in media genres that will function in the professional or public deliberative sphere.

Now there is a rush to occupy some AI space. I hope we can take up some of the work that’s already been done, but there’s so much more to do. We are still in the early days of whatever we want to call the study of what happened to all of us in the last few decades (and the next few). AI is already a huge part of that.