The Message to the Medium
Channels of Communication was conceived in the spirit of the old communications trade press, when the instruments, ambitions and occasional follies of an industry were subjects worthy of public examination. Its motto, The Message to the Medium, is both a reversal and a challenge.
An interface makes assumptions about human behavior. A protocol determines who may participate. A commercial arrangement may decide whose words are heard and whose disappear. These decisions are seldom merely technical, and their consequences deserve more attention than the customary announcements of progress afford them.
Through this journal I wish to celebrate good engineering, question prevailing orthodoxies and hold the architects of our communications systems to account. Moreover, I wish to hold myself to account.
Authorship and collaboration
The emergence of artificial intelligence presents another collection of interesting problems. What becomes of authorship when a machine is no longer merely an instrument, but a collaborator? Can the exchange between human and artificial minds produce new forms of reflection, or even a kind of shared metacognition? Walter Benjamin’s questions concerning art in the age of mechanical reproduction acquire renewed significance when the machinery begins to participate in the creative act itself.
An interface makes assumptions about human behavior. A protocol determines who may participate.
It is my opinion that AI-generated doesn’t necessarily mean inauthentic, no more than typewriter-generated or quill-generated. These instruments have never been indifferent participants in the work. The typewriter imposes its own alphabet, arrangement and rhythm upon the writer; the quill and printing press impose different constraints. Each has altered the nature of expression and our understanding of authorship.
Artificial intelligence enlarges the nature and extent of this participation, but it does not invent it. The question is how these new instruments influence what we make, and how much of the creative act we choose to entrust to them. Collaborative work in concert with a skilled human writer can produce works of extraordinary authenticity. It really is up to the operator, not merely the technology.
This is not to say that instruments should escape examination. Their design, limitations and underlying assumptions are worthy subjects of criticism. But we ought to distinguish between a fault in the instrument, a fault in its operation and a fault in the work itself. The mere employment of a technology is not evidence against the resulting work.
Truly, every medium produces mostly slop. I remember in the early days we dreaded September, when incoming Stanford & Princeton freshmen would discover Usenet, then proceed to violate every established convention of netiquette. And in September of 1993 AOL began offering Usenet access to its subscribers which really opened the slopgates. From then on we said that September never ended, calling it Eternal September.
Essays as experiments
These are questions I hope to explore through essays and experiments with the publications themselves. The Poetics of J-Space, for example, considers presence, silence, and memory in digital environments while asking whether the structure of an essay might allow its reader to experience something of the argument it advances.
The medium, after all, ought to be allowed a reply.
