1.1. Where Is My Jet Pack?

Sound familiar? This was supposed to be the time of ubiquitous flight and Mars travel, cured cancers and realistic virtual reality. Sure, there were major changes—the cost of communication services dropped dramatically, computer parts became impossibly cheap, and the barriers that once imposed scarcity onto communication have come crashing down. But the future looks a lot more like the past than not. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future.

What we understand as the past, to be studied as history, is largely collected through traces that are unreliable. What do we actually know about what voters thought in the presidential election of 1928? What do we know about voters in present-day elections for that matter? Contemporary communication technologies allow ubiquitous access to information and widely distributed contact with individuals. New models are trumpeted as offering access to additional information and possibility, e-commerce technologies that would promise to know consumers better than they know themselves. At the same time, these technologies seem incapable of resolving the problem of public opinion formation and collective action. The underlying problem of the public sphere is not one of technology, but one of passion. So, you don’t have a jet pack, and the forces of hate seem to be gaining strength. Fantastic.

Consider the rise of the everything store, once known as the Sears catalog, now Amazon.com.^[1] There is nothing particularly remarkable about the idea that people would like access to a wide array of goods, delivered to their homes, at reasonable prices. Jobbers delivered an assortment of goods with non-fixed prices, while department stores developed additional inventory and fixed prices (a great improvement over constant negotiation).^[2] Grocery stores and discounters appeared not as a paradigm shift, but as a continuation of the same trend. At times, firms might opt for smaller assortments, but this is merely the play of strategy, as the desires of the population are neatly mapped by business operations. The business of business continues.

What continued for all this time is the desire of the public to be warm, housed, and fed. It is not remarkable that the desires of the public are continuous over time. What varies is the vast array of symbolic expressions of these needs, which come through fashions, cuisines, and other cultural codes. Which is not to say that codes do not become an end in themselves; the rich intertextual life of the public is just as real as the physical life. Manuel DeLanda recognized this when he juxtaposed two distinct gradients for the legitimation of a state: symbolic and material.^[3] A system that provides sustenance with no meaning or intersubjective investment is objectionable, just as a system that has a vast symbolic life with little effect would be an utter failure. Failed symbolic legitimacy can overwhelm physical plenty, just as hunger can overwhelm aesthetic ritual.

This textbook is not an account of the reasons why jet pack development has been so slow. For the most part, this situation would be effectively explained by elementary physics and engineering. In an article on the topic of jet packs in The Guardian, Cardiff University lecturer and science columnist Dean Burnett laid out the key issues with jet pack technology: gravity is a substantial force, and most flying machines use properties like aerodynamic lift and thus require wings for flight, as well as for managing the size and deployment of the engine itself.^[4] After all, it is not enough to build an engine that might lift a human successfully; it must then be attached it to a human being, who needs to survive. The Evergreen Aviation Museum, a world leader in obscure craft, has on display the Spruce Goose as well as a number of single-user escape helicopters. James Bond, eat your heart out. Attaching a thruster to a human body is tricky, and we haven’t even gotten into the issues with buckle development. Burnett’s argument did not hinge on the difficulty in building the machine, but in the fact that it is not desirable. Jet packs are far more dangerous than bicycles, people would make terrible choices with them, and they would produce vast emissions of greenhouse gasses. You don’t want a jet pack—notice that word: “want.”

This is the inflection point for our studies of the future. In communication, the question is rarely whether something is possible, but whether it is probable or desirable. The title is New Media Futures, our subject matter: What are the possible and probable future technologies for the creation of meaning?

1.2. Visions of the Future

All academic fields depend on a largely arbitrary disciplinary moment, a point where some critical ontological or epistemological choice was made that determines the answers to many subsequent questions. What does that mean? Economists often begin from a disciplinary fable about the rationalization of barter. Sociologists may reduce interactions to the result of a social force. Artists explore the moment of genius where creative energy seemingly appears from nowhere. Psychologists find the core of all behavior in the cognitive structure of the individual, with a lurking basis in the brain. The tighter the story, the more likely your discipline is to have prestige. It is not that these stories are entirely wrong, but that they are always necessarily partial.

Communication is a great field because it is organized around a number of weak stories. At the same time, this is a curse when dealing with organization of the university system. Is communication a point to organize around, or a virus that is withering the marrow of disciplinary rigor?

The critical moments for the study of communication would be decisions about people and context (meaning networks and objects), proximal and distant.

This is not to say that scholars may not connect multiple areas of research, but most research tends to fall into these slots. The truth is likely between all: it is not that the infrastructure is enough to cause the movement, but that the movement surely would not have formed without it. Academics select an angle because it provides explanatory leverage that when placed in conversation with other perspectives can provide rich understanding of the world.

Beyond communication, this book is situated with regard to futures studies. This is only one of many possible names for this academic trajectory, along with foresight and many others. In his 1932 call for aid, “Wanted—Professors of Foresight!” H. G. Wells called for the development of a field of foresight, which would deal with unanticipated consequences that accompanied the development of new technology. The question for Wells: Why are publics so reckless when confronting technologies that vastly increase the speed or range of processes? What additional skills could be brought to bear to more effectively engage with these problems?

There are no Professors of Foresight as yet, but I am by way of being an amateur. Let me draw a plain conclusion from tonight’s audition. Either we must make peace throughout the world, make one worldstate, one world-pax, with one money, one police, one speech and one brotherhood, however hard that task may seem, or we must prepare to live with the voice of the stranger in our ears, with the eyes of the stranger in our homes, with the knife of the stranger always at our throats, in fear and in danger of death, enemy-neighbours with the rest of our species. Distance was protection, was safety, though it meant also ignorance and indifference and a narrow, unstimulated life. For good or evil, distance has been done away with. This problem of communications rushes upon us today—it rushes upon us like Jehu the son of Nimshi. It drives furiously. And it evokes the same question: is it peace?

Because if it is not to be peace foreseen and planned and established, then it will be disaster and death. Will there be no Foresight until those bombs begin to rain upon us?^[5]

Wells calls for a futurism that could imagine a peace that could be created with existing technology. Distance is gone; the question becomes how to deal with closeness in the name of peace. The default condition lacked contact; now that contact has been established, how do we deal with it? How do we get over our selves and our nations? This is a cosmopolitan futurism.

In this same period, the futurist movement in Italy took the opposite approach: instead of preserving or creating piece, it desired conflict. For the futurist, nostalgia is the problem, an oppressive force that prevents the technologies of acceleration from transforming society in new, profound ways. Consider this excerpt from a futurist work by F. T. Martinetti:

This is how we deny the obsessing splendor of the dead centuries and collaborate with victorious Mechanics, the force that grips the earth in its network of speed.

We are collaborating with mechanics in destroying the old poetry of distance and wild solitudes, the exquisite nostalgia of departure, and in its place we urge the tragic lyricism of ubiquity and omnipresent speed.

Our Futurist sensibility, in fact, is no longer moved by the dark mystery of an unexplored valley, of a mountain pass that we, in spite of ourselves, picture as crossed by the elegant (and almost Parisian) ribbon of a white road, where an automobile gleaming with progress and full of cultured voices abruptly pulls up, sputtering; a boulevard corner camped in the middle of solitude.

Every pine woods madly in love with the moon has a Futurist road that crosses it from end to end. The simple, doleful reign of endlessly soliloquizing vegetation is over.

With us begins the reign of the man whose roots are cut, the multiplied man who merges himself with iron, is fed by electricity, and no longer understands anything except the sensual delight of danger and quotidian heroism.^[6]

The sensibility here should remind you of the ideology of contemporary technology conglomerates. It isn’t that technology makes things better, but that technology transforms all of life, and those ways that came before are not simply obsolete but regressive. We should consider this not to celebrate futurism, but to see how ideas about speed and destruction recur. Joseph Schumpeter did not invent creative destruction—it was baked into the aesthetics of this movement.^[7] Martinetti pushes us toward an antiromantic view of the world. When Mark Zuckerberg promoted the slogan “move fast and break things,” it was intended to exemplify the challenge to the status quo.^[8] Facebook was a new kind of organization that wouldn’t follow rules. Now, a decade later, we can see that rules of political communication and media ethics were hard won and necessary. Zuckerberg wasn’t new; the futurists understood the appeal of destruction and the power of novelty.

Vannevar Bush in his classic 1945 essay “As We May Think,” which stated in light of the atomic bomb and the success of science in bringing destruction, “now, as peace approaches, one asks where they will find objectives worthy of their best.”^[9] Cognitive extension is the paradigm of new media, especially the creation of enhanced external memory systems that would be well indexed and highly searchable. Better indexing is a key element of the argument, “Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing.” These new indexes would operate more like the human mind, on the basis of associations in unstructured data. Fundamentally, Bush is optimistic, as access to more information and processing capacity could lead us to a future where we think our way out of problems:

Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.^[10]

In 1967, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences published Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress.^[11] An extensive collection of policy inflected perspectives on the future. Unlike Wells’s romantic appeal for peace, Martinetti’s antiromantic zeal, or the utopian promise of enhanced cognition, Daniel Bell’s position comes closest to ours in this book (and likely in your course):

Time, said St. Augustine, is a three-fold present: the present as we experience it, the past as a present memory, and the future as a present expectation. By that criterion, the world of the year 2000 has already arrived, for the decisions we make now, in the way we design our environment and thus sketch the lines of constraints, the future is committed. Just as the gridiron pattern of city streets in the nineteenth century shaped the linear growth of cities in the twentieth, so the new networks of highways, the location of new towns, the reordering of graduate-school curricula, the decision to create or not create a computer utility as a single system, and the like will frame the tectonics of the twenty-first century. The future is not an overarching leap into the distance; it begins in the present.^[12]

Bell sees change as occurring in systems. The contributors to the project span the social sciences, with a range of prescient insights about the power of computer systems to transform decision making and emerging technologies. Where Bell differs from Wells or Martinetti is that he is already postindustrial; technological change is leaving some workers behind. This is a conservative approach characterized by asking what structures we should change, not merely hoping that those changes will be inherently positive. Postindustrialism as a framework supposes that media and information sectors replace underlying basic functions like mining as they become infinitely efficient. Consider that at the time of writing, there are 42,000 people involved in coal mining in the United States, but millions are employed as social media influencers.^[13] On the level of the media industries themselves, the role of influencers in influencing, and influencers related to various fandoms, is very real, and the decline of central constructs like movie studios in California only makes sense because it is an industrial form. But why a conservative approach? Some argue that rapid technological change leads not to progress but to “future shock,” where people are paralyzed or even become reactionary.^[14]

The question of what the media can be is wound up in the issue of who might make film, radio transmitters, fiber-optic cables, and eventually space systems. It is essential to understanding media infrastructures, which are industrial systems. Chemically volatile film requires an industry to produce it and replicate it. Essential to understanding change in the society of the United States is the gripping force of deindustrialization. Cities that once relied on massive machines processing ore to provide wealth now sit rusting. Concentrated industrial age media systems produced national cultures and were essential elements of what was a functional public sphere. The macroeconomic conditions of a society and its media are not separable. Going further, Victoria de Grazia argued in Irresistible Empire that the entire edifice of industry, media, text, and everyday life are a combined form.^[15] The cultural form of life in the United States and Europe, combined with the force of industrial mass production, produced a complete lifeworld. Consider in this context John Maynard Keynes’s theory of the year 2000:

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages.^[16]

The great theorist of demand has a crystal-clear vision of the future: people will use the least amount of effort possible to get the things they want. Living in this future is profoundly mediated both in terms of the access to information that makes it possible and in the sense of the mediation of labor. No longer is one required to go to work or even write something down; various buttons accomplish the work for you (more on buttons later).

1.3. Continuity and Change

The field of media history offers a great deal of insight into the contemporary condition. Historians as a matter of trade are concerned with continuity and change. Like any theoretical dichotomy, the truth is dialectical, lying between the poles. After all, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Many methods in media research are inherently focused on the present (application programming interface scraping, experiments, surveys), and some are even future facing (policy, strategy, design). There is little reason to assume that the academic discipline of history will produce knowledge that we need. More commonly, academic clusters from economics to literature to build their own historical domains, much to historians’ (reasonable) chagrin.

An important historical trope is that of the “modern.” Modern is to be current and enlightened; modern is new and smart. That which came before is backward. Bruno Latour developed this idea in his book We Have Never Been Modern, which questions the rift between prior practices and new practices.^[17] By pushing off the old to the premodern, false novelty provides an illusion of knowledge, a distinction without a difference. This discourse appears in many relevant forms. For you, the reader, the meme that may come to mind is: “It is CURRENT YEAR, how can this be happening?”

James Carey and John Quick described the electrical overturning of social structure as the “electrical sublime.”^[18] The utopian hope that electrification would transform social relations has been an ongoing theme. Carey and Quick describe the Innis-McLuhan exchange, where Canadian theorist Harold Innis argued that electrification would only continue existing power relations, and McLuhan took the position that electrification would enable new modes of life that would restore our everyday space.^[19] Innis was not opposed to technology. His point was rather that ubiquitous technology is neither the key to utopia nor the gateway to despair. Questions of value and structure exist independently of the technical details of society. The ubiquity of electricity transformed society, but not in the mythic dimension of producing an entirely new human.

Vincent Mosco made a similar case in his critique of the digital sublime: the ostensibly new digital world had entirely different rules and marked a transformation in the ways that things are done.^[20] It is not the single online video that transforms televisuality, but the Netflix platform delivered through multiple devices. Cultural theorizing that relied on observations of first adopters would miss the actual interactions of the multitudes of users who had not yet arrived online. Instead of online interaction leading to a destabilization of identity, the identifiers of the users were amplified as the editorial function of prior bottlenecks decreased. Lisa Gitelman and Geoff Pingree argue in their introduction to New Media, 1740-1915 that the idea of “new” operationalizes two discourses: transparency and supersession.^[21] Transparency supposes that the new media somehow make society clear, which if one was to start with a conduit metaphor for communication should solve the problem of miscommunication. Supersession supposes that the new media fully replace the media that came before, which is untrue—the media of the past are re-situated and often placed in positions with more power. Moral panics about new media are not caused by the sudden contamination of an otherwise pure and perfect world by awful new technology, but that new technology tends to arrive with social change. Students continue to come to class with a rich historical narrative of the War of the Worlds panic, despite the panic not having taken place. The reasons for the exaggeration are fairly straightforward: for a public concerned about infiltration and mob violence, the story fits their priors; for newspaper journalists, it offered a great opportunity to attack the dangerous new media—radio.^[22] Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow go further in documenting the legacy of the report on the event, ostensibly by Hadley Cantril (excluding coauthors, especially women), which provided seeming academic legitimacy for the panic story.^[23]

For the most part, there is a great deal of continuity—people and their desires remain fairly similar over time, and our historical accounts tend to show how things remain the same. At the same time, things really do change. The Berlin Wall fell, security schemes failed, and a virus swept across the world. Nassim Taleb has argued that the approach to theorizing from continuity is backward. The optimal theory for the future in this view would depend on the analysis of structures from the perspective of “black swan” events and more complex dynamics that come with nonlinear systems.^[24] Taleb’s critical contribution of antifragility provides our theoretical approach—instead of assuming that systems evolve toward some harmonious order, he proposes a rigorous accounting of structures, forces, or ideas that thrive on disorder.^[25] These antifragile dimensions are inherently multifactorial. It is not that a single thing changed (or stayed the same) but that any change is a collection of multiple, intersecting changes. Consider the evolution of content moderation online—what was once minimal became substantially more active (as everyone got online), and then it became subtler and more nuanced. In their history of moderation at Twitter, Emillie de Keulenaar, João C Magalhães, and Bharath Ganesh documented the ways that the pragmatics of moderation changed as well as the very idea of what was objectionable in the first place.^[26] A historical approach to the study of a present problem offers a rich and complex view of moderation that could not be captured with a present-focused approach.

1.4. Convergence and Emergence

Among the most interesting and important features of any theory are those that explain the relationships between micro- and macro-factors. Process development often hinges on factors that are difficult to observe, exist between levels of explanation, or are paradoxically hidden by the very constructs that would make them meaningful in the first place.

When we describe emergence, it is not that some media are “emerging,” but that some ideas appear as constellations that then are recognized only once they are in effect in the world. Emergence and convergence are not opposites. It is important to note that this book is written from the perspective that emergence is not unobservable or unknown, but rather that it is along the lines proposed by Mario Bunge where emergence is a combination that produces novelty:

In other words, we explain the emergence, behavior, and dismantling of systems in terms not only of their composition and environment, but also of their total (internal and external) structure. Nor is this enough: we should also know something about the system’s mechanism or modus operandi: that is what process makes it behave—or cease to behave—the way it does.^[27]

A certain structural functional logic can guide our analysis of emergence in media systems. Our emergent combinations do not mystically make more than their sum, but they are embedded in complex assemblages that are already designed to incorporate the possibility of desire. These models also have assumptions and rhetorical frames, generally the social designs that are supposed are biological or mechanical. Despite this oversight, there are important lessons to draw from systems theory, one that is particularly pithy and for Bunge useful: don’t skip levels. A theoretical explanation needs to account for the micro, mezzo, and macro, even if just in a cursory way.

Convergence, in contrast, implies that two things are merged intentionally. Sociology and anthropology converge at the cultural dimension of meaning and the model of structures. These modes of convergence do not produce novelty; instead, they are ways of arriving at particular structural functions or changes through combination. Convergence tends then to describe how financial structures allow a large conglomerate to function or the sort of devices that will provide us with an infinite supply of television reruns. As a landmark term, convergence refers to the entire manifold of textual innovations driven by the consolidation of multipurpose platforms in the early 2000s.^[28] Convergence would then be the driver of participatory culture.^[29] The conceptual challenge decades into this theory set would not be that participatory culture is impactful or engaging, but the assumption that it would be pro-social is specious (more on this in section 1.9, “Ideology”).

Scalable, planned interventions collide with the everyday knowledge of the field. Michael De Certeau famously framed this as the distinction between the strategic and the tactical.^[30] James C. Scott used an analog of this insight in his critique of high-modern social planning. Plans fail because the way that planners see scale makes it almost impossible to comprehend the situation in the same way that people on the ground do. When we think about successful convergence, as expressed as a transmedia property, the result is the opposite of novelty. Exposition of an existing novel story system is the most effective way to generate a return. In other words, convergence was trapped within the horizon of the industries driving it.

This is not to say that convergence cannot produce novel results, but that if the overt design of a system is to produce more of the same, it seems unlikely that the conditions for novelty will be truly present.

What do you notice in this picture? A poorly placed sidewalk. The users of this environment have a clear preference to walk directly ahead, down the sidewalk that was once placed in this location. Now that the sidewalk has been moved slightly, people continue to walk where they want.

Desire lines exist in many places; you likely know of locations where the sidewalks were laid out as a grid even though people would clearly prefer curves or angles. Robert Moor, reviewing the problem of desire lines, noted that in Central Park in New York City, desire lines were paved, a guide to where sidewalks should go.^[31] We could then see the things that people make as the lines in the grass of the conglomerates. Rather than policing them today, TikTok and other social media platforms encourage this activity. In this era, “content creator” has replaced so many other career titles. Leveling might be good in some cases, but it also costs the public dearly, as it levels all content as mere feedstock for the platform economy. Perhaps your author is a reactionary, but not all texts are equal in social value.

Lurking within this account is a deconstructive take: convergence then includes a theory of a self-organizing public sphere, which is fundamentally a theory of emergence. Professor Henry Jenkins cites Pierre Levy, who relies on Friedrich Hayek to undergird the theory of collective intelligence.^[32] One could track the other assumptions in collective intelligence theory, like a self-organizing public sphere, the efficient accretion of tacit knowledge into collective memory, and effective community moderation to judge the theory set.

1.5. What Is Critical Thinking / Conditions of Possibility?

How often do you think critically about critical thinking? Contemporary educational discourse supposes that critical thinking is an unquestioned good, but do we even know what it is or how to tell if we have encountered real deep thinking or pseudo-intellectual nonsense? This section is about epistemology, the way we think about thinking, especially how we determine if ideas are right or wrong, or if they make or don’t make sense.

1.5.1. The Simple Conditions

There is an important distinction between necessary and sufficient. Consider the development of a fire, which needs fuel, oxygen, and heat to ignite. Remove any one of these three necessary elements, and there are no longer are sufficient conditions for fire. Warmth and air are a summer day.

Developed by Immanuel Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason, the conditions of possibility argument asks that we find what must else must be true for some .^[33] Instead of a metaphysical position that treats human sensory experience as secondary, Kant produced a system that allows sensation to be the primary focus of philosophy. Within the world of experience, Kant considers some experiences to be special, such as those that lift us up out of our normal perception. Slavoj Zizek proposes that these experiences are both sublime and disappointing, as they remind us that we exist in a world of perception. Excavation of the conditions of possibility for the media present an essential task for future studies. The following are two examples of this sort of analysis.

First, in his 2005 classic Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins argues that new participatory cultures will be enabled by the convergence of media technologies.^[34] When students encounter the book, they are often quizzical: they live in a nearly completely converged world, where the idea of medium specificity or a rigid break between the Internet and the television is alien. Convergence is a fact of their lives; it does not have the positive and progressive implications described in the book.

What readers miss in the account of convergence culture is that the underlying drive would be that of a robust culture encountering lower barriers for interaction online. It was not the convergence of the devices that would have transformed social life, but the changing culture. Accounting for the forces within the convergence story is the reason why we assign this book to this day.

Second, it would be folly to say that all of the implications of convergence culture would have been possible if the culture had simply tried harder. Digital nonlinear editing (DNLE) software transformed the workflows of the contemporary media producer. Rapid, ubiquitous time-axis manipulation of video is remarkable and even necessary for the development of our current media culture. DNLE did not cause social change alone—it was merely a critical part.

In more concrete terms, the conditions of possibility for a thing are all the things that must be true for it to exist. A house with wooden studs requires a timber industry to produce materials. The entire chain of material operations necessary to make the house is required but not necessarily apparent in the style of the windows. The conditions of possibility are often invisible and taken for granted.

Distinguishing between necessary and sufficient in this case assumes causation. Although metaphysical speculation is interesting and occasionally useful, for our purposes, we can assume that there are causes and effects in this world. Causation is special, and mere correlation is blocked from taking on the power of a cause.

1.5.2. Episteme

The procession of ostensibly invisible forms is apparent in discourse as well. In his remarkable book The Order of Things, Michael Foucault describes an episteme that investigates the discursive conditions of possibility for the present.^[35] The layering of ideas and the progress of those ideas can also be excavated for analysis; this task is called genealogy. Foucauldian analysis asks the reader to consider the history of an idea and to take seriously the idea that one system of ideas can inflect another.

A powerful effect of this shift is the “death of the author.”^[36] Roland Barthes criticized the romantic genius and the way that the idea of the author allows a search for a “secret, an ultimate meaning, to the text.”^[37] This insight has been found in other communication fields as well. Ed Black, in a critique of neo-Aristotelianism, says we should judge speeches on the basis of their effect in circulation, not the intention of the speaker.^[38] The horizon of meaning must exceed individual intent.

Foucault goes further to attack the institution of authorship and the privilege of the subject in producing text. This poststructural provocation is powerful, as many of the technologies considered in this book, and in communication research today, involve autopoiesis, or texts produced by automation. Think of the authorship of a Facebook feed—your social media feed was produced by selective production, filtered by relevance and recency of content created by many other people. The website/app you experience is untouched by human hands, as there was no author as such. This does not mean that the assumptions used to produce the program are somehow nonhuman. At this point we tend to infuse the creators of such systems with the romantic genius quality of the author. Characters like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates replace Shakespeare.

Staging the larger debate about the role of structure and human agency is critical. Some scholars emphasize the profoundly human dimension of communication, framing research through the stories of people. This anthropological strand of communication research is important and stands in juxtaposition to the sociological strands that would focus on the mathematics of diffusion, or the critical/cultural, which would decenter the story of the actor and the network for a genealogy of the discourses that made sense of both the network and the actors. The disciplinary matrix of communication will be explored at length in section 1.2 of this book.

How we understand human agency is a profoundly important episteme.

1.5.3. Modal Logic

Necessity requires that something be not possibly false. Contingency would allow a conjecture that would possibly be both true and false. Those claims that are truly necessary would be limited in the sense that that they would not include the conjectural information. Necessity is boring. Analytic results in general are powerful, as they are restricted to simple qualities. The associated theory of positivism depends on the elimination of ambiguous or multiple signs. This presents an important limit on the use of analytic propositions for the study of communication.

Consider Jaques Lacan’s position on conjectural and exact sciences.^[39] While it might be tempting to cast off humanist reason and rebuild communication around a purely scientific basis, many social science disciplines are founded on probabilistic grounds. This does not mean that every claim is equal, but at times you are likely to work with various conjectures that could be the truth. Consider that null-hypothesis testing, the bedrock of traditional social science, supposes that one might see an alternate universe that was some other way. Of course this is impossible; research is always a conjecture.

1.5.4. Modes of Proof

Consider the kind of proof you are employing. For the most part, you use reduction and abduction in everyday life. Deduction and induction are useful for mathematical processes but are difficult to find in the real world.

Much of contemporary argumentation theory offers ways of theorizing the various logical leaps that are made with abductive reason (more on this later).

1.6. Time and Temporality

When are we? I often ask this question of students, and there are many satisfying answers. Some answers conceive of time as an objective thing. As the agents of the Federation Bureau of Temporal Investigations explain to a befuddled Captain Sisko, “time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.”^[40] There is a powerful truth here: time as we perceive it is real (time is a condition of possibility—it surely exists, and to consider what it is would be fully speculative), and some events are path dependent. You cannot have microcomputers without transistors. This is the time of chronos: when we are and how events process. In contrast, without the performative dimension of the initial public offering, the moment of the microcomputer revolution would be unmarked. This leads to an essential idea in logistical medial theory: time, at least as it exists in our perception—organized through calendars, clocks, towers, and other systems—is media.^[41]

Kairos positions time as a point; this is the moment of now.^[42] The means by which the moment is produced are central to communication theory as a whole. Time as a moment is inherently synthetic. Chronos continues to proceed even if we ignore it. Time telescopes as you get older, facts that you once knew that seemed fresh and important can become painfully dated. Consider the way that people talk about electricity generation. In the early nineties, it was a meaningful thing to say that the “technology isn’t ready yet.” If this is baked into your conception of the current moment, you have missed decades of innovation. Gone are the days of Enron-engineered blackouts, which made sense while California was an energy importer.^[43] Today, California sends out its solar energy to avoid oversupply.^[44] Publics often remain in moments long after the clock has moved on.

24/7, 365. A cliché intended to express that someone is continuously engaged. The problem: there are more than 24 hours demarcated at any given moment on earth. Assuming that it is 15:00 Pacific Daylight Time on a Thursday, it is 12:00 Friday on Terina Island and 10:00 Thursday on Baker Island.^[45] These times are Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) -12 and 14, respectively. The standardization of time was a profound political project that was necessary for mass communication and commerce systems. Critical to this evolution were synchronized timekeeping devices and timetables, which allowed individuals to have a sense of how time existed across the system.^[46] Per Eviatar Zerubavel’s historical account, the driver of a unified time in the United States was the railroad system, which offered a secular sense of time controlled by the specialists of the American Railway Association.^[47] This displacement of local religious authority was a manipulation of the clock (Daylight Savings Time), what religious groups called “blasphemous interference with the divine natural order.”^[48]

Consider the great time machine of the early twenty-first century: Twitter. At its peak, the attention-focusing mechanism of the Twitter platform had powerful intermedia agenda-setting effects. That which was trending on Twitter was the news. This was not the only form of media that produced a sense of daily time. In the network television era, scheduled viewing produced “prime time,” when mass audiences would enjoy specific programs, and some lighter fare, that typically aired after the news. For generations, media students were well educated on scheduling practices and branding theory (each network had a coherent aesthetic) that played into the media mix.^[49] Television seasons and practices produced reality but were constrained by the limits of the physical world; after all, people like to go outside to enjoy the longer evenings in the summer. It is also particularly important to understand that the underlying time of our cellular phone networks is Unix epoch time, which is measured in the number of seconds past the beginning of 1970. This computerized time is kept via various atomic clocks and satellite devices, although Global Positioning System (GPS) time standard differs from Unix time, as its epoch begins on January 5, 1980.^[50] Computational time systems allow the circulation of complex personal regimes of time.

1.7. Speculative

A common adjunct term used in the discussion of the future is speculative. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, in their book Speculative Everything, pose that speculative methods for design are intended to provide a grounded opportunity for the evaluation of potential worlds. Existing within the clear boundaries of the possible, speculation is intended to break the linkage between the probable and the plausible, allowing the consideration of the preferable.^[51] Fantasy (and metaphysical speculation) is not particularly useful for speculative research.

Dunne and Raby take direction from Richard Barbrook (known for his development of Californian ideology), whose position on future imagination begins with a consideration of the way that the image of the future is often forgotten.^[52] A limitless future had been promised repeatedly, and none of the promises of current boosters are particularly unique.^[53] In rhetorical studies, this appears in the use of the phrase “future anterior,” invoked as a device where a utopian future potential is leveraged against the present. This is in an important sense the inverse of “tarrying with the negative,” where the scales of evaluation are shifted by the application of a nebulous, negative value.^[54] Although Barbrook does not use this phrase in his writing, the critique comes through clearly in his descriptions of Bell Labs and the wildly optimistic presentations of participatory culture. The utopian promise of technology is always just around the corner, whether that is Walter Cronkite promising a world without hunger or swarms of robots making labor obsolete.

Among the central problems in the existing regime of design thought is the sort of vision employed by these organizations. Design has become a quick gloss for aestheticizing their products or plans. Those organizations have a high-modern sensibility that is intrinsically strategic—it loses the sense of how people really live. What speculative storytelling often does is emphasize the everyday dimension, the sort of experience that high-modern imagination loses.

Workshops in “design thinking” (when not speculative) risk becoming branding for following instructions. When design is reduced to problem solving for a client, it becomes reactionary. The client decides what the problem is and continuously redefines the scope of acceptable solutions. The magic of design disappears. At the same time, the clients paying for design thinking seminars may feel that they have gotten their money’s worth, as following the instructions of a powerful person is presented as creative activity. The real magic may be service with a smile. Speculative design is intended as a political program that can unmoor the tools of design as an academic pursuit from the rough docks of problem-solving methods. Instead of a design theory that finds answers to questions posed by powerful institutions, speculation allows designers to find their own questions and to design for society, rather than for a particular client. Problem solving is only one of a number of epistemic possibilities; speculation, as much as it enables argumentation and debate, is an academic technology that can produce new knowledge in fruitful ways. It is not a new insight that design and argument are deeply linked, but what is fascinating are the discourses presented to justify the lack of creativity in the design process itself.

Where the perspective by communication researchers differs from designers is that we are generally interested in the ways that discourses would need to change to arrive at a possible future. It would be reasonable to conclude that communication is slightly more conservative in disciplinary outlook than design or architecture. It would also be reasonable to see this as a reflection of larger disciplinary coordinates, as communication is not locked into a problem-solving epistemology.

We should consider some of the methods for speculation proposed by Dunne and Raby:^[55]

• Fictional Worlds: literary and artistic contributions can challenge the stability of signs and promote new combinations
• Utopia/Dystopia: work through the ideas to either of the two extreme conclusions; the juxtapositions are productive
• Extrapolation: follow the dreams that lead to existing designs, and let the dreams play out all the way to their conclusions
• Idea Stories: writing concepts as narratives; they use the example of red plenty (a new technological planned Soviet economy); use the narrative and look for resonances
• Thought Experiments: collide ideas in a nonnarrative form, work with the abstraction of the formula
• Reduction to the Absurd: take the idea to the point that it fails and then literalize it
• Counterfactuals: flip one of the actually flippable switches at a moment in history, and suppose how that specific change would have affected the present
• What-Ifs: flip one of the switches for the conditions of the present and work forward

These methods are ways to help you think about how the world could be and how it should be. Speculation is powerful because it allows us to retake the imaginative language of design without being loaded into a static concept of reality. Instead of obsessing over whether the matrix of possible alternatives is acceptable to the client, we become the client, or imagine a new client, or abandon the idea of the client itself. Wicked problems are ultimately hard to solve because many people don’t want them solved. Speculative design expands the range of possibilities.

1.8. Virtual

Virtual does not refer to a device, be that goggles or a suit, but to the prospect of a synthetic perception. Brian Massumi, Canadian communications professor and specialist in sensation and communication research, has argued that the virtual only exists in the combination of position and moment, as an effect of an endless loop of sensation, “When its effects are multiple, the virtual fleetingly appears. Its fleeting is in the cracks between and the surfaces around the images.”^[56] Contemporary affect theory in communication has linked the physical, textual, and relational: “Affects are virtual synthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing particular things that embody them.”^[57] What does this mean? How you feel when you experience something matters. Your body and perspective are not barriers to understanding the world—they are the world. Andrew Murphie describes this as an enfolding, the multiple faces of what is ultimately a single surface.^[58]

The virtual as a form of synthetic perception is deeply connected to the imagination. Once we establish a theory of virtuality that exceeds the sum of parts and perception, the analysis of the virtual comes to include physical and discursive considerations. Virtual worlds are then the worlds we inhabit as well as the imaginary worlds that we feel into possible existence.

1.9. Ideology

Ideology is a commonly used word that generally refers to a system of ideas that provide a coherence to thinking that exceeds the basic descriptive facts of the world. In this sense, everyone is ideological. If you were to remind someone that their worldview was in a sense ideological, they would likely be offended. The term itself connotes the sense that an ideology is artificial. To consider what ideology is and why it is important, we should consider a few practical ideas.

How do we deal with people who have wrong perspectives? A straightforward case here would be the consideration of individuals opposed to the vaccination of children. Vaccines are a safe and effective way to decrease the prevalence of infectious disease. The solution to non-vaccination would seem to be to challenge the ideology of the individuals, telling them that experts have determined that vaccination is safe. It must be that some bad piece of information is blocking their mind from arriving at the truth. Remove the bad block, and they will think correctly. But this doesn’t work. Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler’s research has been exemplary in demonstrating boomerang effects where seemingly ideology-solving messages actually backfire, solidifying the underlying belief.^[59] What the seemingly crude theory of ideology misses is the idea that expertise, a form of backing that would be taken seriously in some ideological frames, is negative in the conspiratorial frame of the antivaccine movement. Rather than operating as a bad idea that somehow clouds the mind, conspiracy discourse has a much richer symbolic life.

Conspiracy theories are a popular topic for research, as they are a wicked problem for moving society forward. Jodi Dean, a leading political theorist, went as far as to ground the conspiracy as one of the foundational units for political analysis today.^[60] The underlying structure of conspiracy includes the dominant duped view, which is maintained by a nefarious actor who knows secret information that would lead to a complete overturning of the dominant discourse. A participant in a conspiracy theory is not passive; they are actively working to reveal to you and the degree to which you are duped by ideology. Elizabeth Anker has argued that the dominant affective position of American politics is melodrama, of which conspiracy is a key form.^[61] Conspiracy theories are both satisfying and practical. QAnon conspiracy discourses allow believers to incorporate bad news into their framework by inverting the roles of other characters in the drama.

If one wears a Q shirt to a rally and demands the release of the inspector general’s report (known in that discourse as the OIG Report), they likely are aware of the controversy that is the QAnon conspiracy theory and have considered it as such. More importantly, they are participating in a structure of discourse that has all marks of critical thinking, including close reading, evaluating sources, and presenting evidence.^[62] This is where Dean, citing Zizek and Peter Sloterdjik, has formulated ideology as “enlightened false consciousness.”^[63] People know that there are inconsistencies in their beliefs, but they choose to continue. Ideology is not something that happens to people, like a nightmare they need to be woken up from. Instead, ideology is something people do for themselves to make their worlds. Ideological critique has languished in recent years, as the mere identification of an ideology means little, and the application of new information likely doesn’t lead to attitude change. In other words, ideology is not the function of an echo chamber but the active work of a subculture.^[64] Melissa Zimdars, Megan Cullinan, and Kilhoe Na argue that alternative health groups are not simple misinformation, as they function as communities that rectify the feeling of lost personal security.^[65] Given that health information influence threads are among the most important, this is a central future topic. An important step forward may be to tie the treads together into a single framework of “information conflict,” although this loses the rhetorical appeal of mere misinformation.^[66] In terms of simple empirics, people believe they are negotiating with the algorithm; they are not mere passive subjects influenced by it.^[67] Misinformation is a brittle paradigm.

This is not to say that attitude change is impossible. We have decreased tobacco use and increased condom use, but the underlying relationships around belief are not linear or based on simple delusion. Joshua Kalla and David Brockman have found that persuasion related to social issues, such as gay marriage, is possible but most effective when not tied to an impending political measure.^[68] People are willing to have interesting conversations, as long as they are not motivated as such.

It also becomes clear why marketplace of ideas models fail—ideas are often mislabeled or mishandled, and the buyers are often also sellers who come to market with strict shopping lists. Changing attitudes depends on affective change, a virtual dimension that is much more interesting for our consideration of potential futures.

In May 2012, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a ban on giant cups of soda. The reasoning: the consumption of sweetened beverages is a public health problem, so if people were made to “double-fist” their nectar, they might drink less. You could still buy a ton of soda, it would just be less convenient. The pushback was intense: limiting people to 16-ounce cups was a major loss of freedom. Eventually, the regulation was struck down as exceeding the authority of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Behavior change is important, especially in the context of population health. If a substance is truly dangerous, it is highly regulated. Tobacco and alcohol are good examples here. What do we do when the case for regulation isn’t so clear, or when an overt ban would be heavy-handed? Cass Sunstein (a law professor) and Richard Thaler (a behavioral economist) proposed a theory called libertarian paternalism, where instead of overt, strong prohibitions on conduct, a series of small changes in design called nudges could be employed to subtly change behavior.^[69] Changes in “choice architecture” could lead to different results by manipulating: defaults, expected error, action mapping, feedback mechanisms, layouts, and incentives.^[70] If one were to simply change the context around the individual, they would make the “right” choice. What is striking here is the resonance between this position and the crude theory of ideology. There are many times when better-designed systems can produce better results, but those situations will rarely align with practical politics or the leverage of the state.

1.10. Speed and Slowness

Just as the futurist aesthetic challenges the provincialism of slowness, vegetation, and romanticism, the accelerationists now challenge the axiological assumptions about the slowness, stillness, embodiment, mindfulness (and many others) of contemporary theory. A key reference point in the literature on accelerationism is the Marxian claim that capitalism collapses because of its own internal contradictions. The dependence of accelerationism on this foundation is also contested.^[71] Why would this point matter? If we have some predictable end point to social process, it would seem reasonable that if we could engineer that process to accelerate, it could be beneficial. The inevitable collapse narrative is convenient, but it misses the key point made by Friedrich Pollock that as market systems strain under their own contradictions, they tend to become authoritarian fusions that he calls “state capitalism.”^[72] They don’t just collapse. Depending on which core classes you have taken, you can see a lurking debate about the nature of social theory developing here.

Without the broader consideration of social theory, we could also see accelerationism as the choice to embrace contemporary technology. Once the choice is made to embrace technology, the study of the internal structure of capitalism as it is, abstraction, and acceleration, the range of possibilities for both research and politics dramatically increases. Alex Williams and Nick Strnick’s chapter in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader poses a different accelerationist future. The traditional points for the critique of the human sciences as romantic return to what is increasingly a fantasy world. The future is taken by those who actively deploy the tools of modernity toward their own ends:

To do so, the Left must take advantage of every technological and scientific advance made possible by capitalist society. We declare that quantification is not an evil to be eliminated, but a tool to be used in the most effective manner possible. . . .

The tools found in social network analysis, agent-based modeling, big data analytics, and non-equilibrium economic models, are necessary cognitive mediators for understanding complex systems like the modern economy. The accelerationist Left must become literate in these technical fields.^[73]

The “left” in the context of this extended block quote can just as easily mean humanists or social scientists or artists. For many years, it was fashionable to critique computational means of thought production and then defend meaningful theoretical structures. Today, these moves keep academic debates frozen in time. Among the most important ideas to move beyond is the critique of mastery, the idea that using technology in a quantitative project was a claim to fully represent the world and control that representation.^[74] Researchers need to be good with technology. Future media students need to deploy a combination of theoretical, cultural, and technical methods; they don’t need a sophisticated list of excuses for why they don’t know how to do things.

The accelerationist moment is a feedback loop.^[75] By unleashing cybernetic power, the accelerationist turn could potentially enable the singularity, which is the concept that a powerful enough computer could allow the uploading of all intelligence into a single artificial meta-structure.^[76] The question of the desirability of assimilation into a collective is another matter entirely. For advocates of singularity, the prospect of brain-computer interfacing is exciting, as it can potentially transform possibility into embodiment. For those opposed, it is embodiment itself that is the heart of the human condition. At the same time, only artificial intelligence (AI) capable of producing the singularity can truly cause such an event.

Two important answers to the concept of accelerationism. First, the expansion of disciplinary power (governmentality) tracks along with the expansion of technology in society. Ubiquitous surveillance, sensors, drone warfare, and the entire panoptic experience of advertising remind us that there is no moment where the technology allows you to escape power. The empirical literature to this point has concluded that the emergence of AI systems and their integration into governance end in a self-reinforcing loop of authoritarian control, not substantive liberation.^[77] If there ever was a moment where this was true, it was in the mid-1990s, and even then, only for a privileged few. After all, as we have already explored in the context of media history, it is when media technology becomes ubiquitous that it is fully transformative. Second, platforms devoted to the acceleration seem to be caught in a short circuit of violent desires. The transformation of Twitter into X is a key example.

Accelerationism can provide two important insights:

• Humanistic critique often relies on implicit value assumptions that are intrinsically conservative, which may be challenged or even inverted.
• If social models include an underlying deterministic structure, it could be beneficial to reach the results of that process.

The first part of this section presumes a generous reading of accelerationism. As the years have passed since the first edition of this book, the theory of left accelerationism has faded. Accelerationism is also used to describe processes of forced transition that are not predicated on an emancipated society but instead toward acts of terror that would bring about ethnonationalism or monarchy. In the context of the racist versions of accelerationism, the fundamental problem is that determinism is extended to the realm of all human relations. Consider the existence of “black pill” adherents in Incel communities. These people are convinced that they are genetically doomed, with some going as far as to celebrate violence against what they perceive to be an inevitable, stacked genetic order that then extends to concepts of gender and race. Better and worse kinds of people would be subjected to eugenic manipulation in the name or reaching an ostensibly superior end point. Instead of determinism getting to utopian socialism, it ends in despair, depression, and death.

Another branch supposes that the telos of governance is not a participatory democracy but instead a return to monarchy. In this version of the story, Silicon Valley comes to believe its own mythos, that magical geniuses in garages invented the Internet and all computer technology seemingly on their own. Chief executives become monarchs, and the American tech corporations become the structure of the kingdom of the future. Fictional this account is. Public investment and infrastructure in the development of technology are forgotten, as are the realities of corporate governance. This version of the argument is fundamentally flattery, much like effective altruism, things that powerful people want to hear.^[78] There is a lot of truth in this argument, but also the essential question of civics is still open in this society. It has yet to be seen whether democracy will hold in the West, whether neoliberalism can survive under its contradictions. Absent meaningful market controls, the accretion disk of wealth around powerful people might be covering a black hole for freedom. The unworthy would then be easily seen as those without money. Instead of being a strong view of the social science in question, the theory starts to resemble the arguments for the essentialism of the family from the early 1980s and the neo-Calvinism of George Gilder.^[79] Accelerationism then becomes something like a melodrama where good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.

Epistocracy is the most generous reading here—the case for government by the smartest. Plato flashes through the new media space and will again soon. Today, our philosopher-kings would loathe being described as philosophers. It reeks of the liberal arts—their sources of reflection on philosophical issues come from some online sources, their intuitions from their physical training, and technical details from systems. It would seem these are engineer-kings. There is something profoundly similar to ancient Greece here. Epistocracy has many obvious objections, biases, self-interests, along with homophyly, unaccountability, and more. I will focus on one of particular interest raised by David Estlund: the demographic objection, that those who might be positioned to be the wise rulers are otherwise epistemically damaged by the processes of reaching that position.^[80] Anyone who reaches the position of becoming engineer-king should not. In this thought experiment, we could even conclude that Silicon Valley billionaires are in fact the smartest and fittest for rule among us, but that the process of becoming a billionaire twists one’s mind and soul so that they are no longer fit to lead. Noam Yuran’s work on the psychological dimensions of money is persuasive, as the desire for money and power among our elite is seemingly limitless.^[81] The desire for money that those who wish to be monarchs today hold is not healthy. Even if one were enamored of epistocratic rule, they should take heed that the idea of intelligence itself is arbitrary, that appeals to smartness are all to easily turned when the ostensibly dumb side decides they were smart all along.^[82]

1.11. Simulation

The prospect that reality is an illusion has a long history across many human cultures. Sensation is not satisfying; there must be some other reality out there. Make no mistake—this is not a claim that the physical world does not exist, but that there is no higher essence that could somehow be beyond the world as we understand it.

Jean Baudrillard provocatively claimed that “the Iraq War did not take place.”^[83] What he meant by this was not that there was no military conflict in Iraq, but that role of media performance in the war was such that it produced a new reality of war, a virtual world where one experiences the war through the vision of a military system attacking a building. The kinds of wars, and seemingly spectacular yet invisible costs, could dramatically recalibrate the choice to engage in armed conflict. At the highest level, this forms a simulacrum, a symbolic world more real than reality.^[84] Escape is not an option. There is no way out of language, and the alternative is to critique the most pernicious forms within our simulation. In opposition to the central thesis of accelerationism, that there is an end point that can be approached to history or a system of symbols, Baudrillard reminds us that there is no end point. History is always already in the recycling, as we are continuously remaking it. There is no end point that we are moving toward, just more discourse.

The most popular simulation topic today comes in the form of the simulation argument. Presented in this form by Nick Bostrom, we are asked to consider the possibility that we are currently living in a simulation. The essential premise of this argument is that a highly technically advanced civilization would likely have seemingly infinite computing power.^[85] From this point, the prospect that a civilization could run an ancestor simulation (a realistic virtual world that we are a part of) is possible, assuming that the processes by which such a civilization would come to pass would not be entirely self-destructive. Bostrom is thus not arguing directly that we live in a simulation, but that we should consider the conditions of possibility for arriving in the state of post-humanity, where we might have seemingly infinite computing power. Anil Ananthaswamy, reviewing the state of the science and engineering around the simulation hypothesis, found a number of foundational problems, running the gamut from a lack of adequate computing power to simulate a universe, to the non-falsifiability of the question (metaphysics is not science), to the finding that simulation theory violates Occam’s razor—it is needlessly complicated. Infinite compute itself is a double bind; if the computing power necessary to simulate the entire universe existed, why would that power leave a trace? The way out of this sort of argument would be to engage the foundations of how the superintelligent computer could calculate in the first place; specifically, it might not be as smart as we need it to be. The simulation hypothesis restages Plato’s cave and gets at a core human question: Is this all there is?

Existential risk, the prospect that humanity or any human like civilization could be destroyed, becomes a central concern for the evaluation of possible futures.^[86] H. G. Wells’s consideration in “Wanted—Professors of Foresight!” was that new technologies obliterated distance. It was not that a utopia of infinite communication was coming, but that the new technologies heralded new destructive possibilities. Simulation provides us a framework for considering what the world could and should be.

In a more concrete sense, deepfakes are a profound immanent problem. Deepfakes use neural nets to map images and sounds.^[87] Primarily used to produce pornography and propaganda, deepfakes allow the simulation of what would be real material. The status of photographic evidence has already been in decline for many years; deepfakes allow a transition from a singular fake to an entire moving, vivacious, simulated fake. The reason why deepfakes are so vexing for the public sphere is because they are able to fully break the chain of the indexical trace. Phillip Rosen argued that the fundamental quality of images in the public sphere is their capacity to provide evidence of having been there—that there was something real that existed.^[88] This is the metaphysical challenge of mediation: in order for our worlds to exist and make sense, information about distant events and preferences must be brought to us regularly. One reaction to this is to prioritize direct sensations, that which you may personally perceive. Returning to our visions of the future, the only one that saw the retreat of mediation was the dystopian side of H. G. Wells, where the failure to achieve peace as an active concept led to unrelenting horror. It also stands to reason that if you are reading this book for a class, you also accept the role of mediation in the human future.

Simulation can be powerful and productive. Games allow us to see new perspectives and enjoy ourselves. Simulation models offer explanations of social dynamics and reality that were unavailable through mere observation of the world. More on this in section 4.23.

1.12. Power

In a physics course, power is described as P = W/t. This is a pithy but interesting opening, as much of what we are interested in as communication researchers is the ways in which work is done over time. Some kinds of communication direct the exchange of goods or services or coordinate the actions of people. It is not hard to see how power operates here. That said, it is key to distinguish power as an organizational and structural effect from violence. Hannah Arendt argues that “power cannot be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies, like the instruments of violence, but exists only in its actualization,” and violence is what is deployed when the deliberative activity of power is no longer active.^[89] Power is the way, through discourse, that we produce the material conditions of life. There is no need to be afraid of power; it is a necessary and inevitable part of society. The alternative is not a world free of power, but a world of violence.

You may have noticed that the histories included in the media history section tended to be about quotidian things or stories of human agency. This was not an accident. For the most part, the safest explanatory mechanism for almost anything in communication is a somewhat squishy notion of culture. Although squishy, cultural power is very real—it exists in norms, values, and aesthetics. It would be a fatal mistake to argue in the early 21st century that aesthetics are not central to the function of power. It is not at all unreasonable to argue that countries like the United States are facing a challenge in the aesthetics of power. For decades in communication, the theoretical idea of a presidential style was considered at length.^[90] Presidential power was performed by two different presidents at the same time, the ostensible leader operating from their office position and the physical person. When George H. W. Bush was ill and vomited during a diplomatic reception, it was seen as a troubling moment where the president’s real body was reasserted. The aged reality of President Joe Biden interrupted his presidential performance. Atilla Hallsby argued that we could “imagine there is no President” to understand that the presidency is the accretion effects, not first and foremost the expression of a person.^[91] Now, the president seems to be physically forward at all times, to the point that the body of the president displaces the symbolic logics that produce the presidency. As Rachel Plotnick notes, there was no nuclear button on the president’s desk in 2018, only a red button that called for the delivery of a Diet Coke.^[92] For what it’s worth, President Gerald Ford may have had four buttons for different beverages.

Cultural power was seen as so valuable that for a time “soft power” would replace traditional hard power as the basis of the power projection of the United States.^[93] John Durham Peters argues in his introduction to Friedrich Kittler’s Optical Media that the book’s focus on military technology and applications for optics can serve as a necessary corrective for overly quotidian visions of media history.^[94] For every history of the Post-It note or inventory of everyday life, there is an undone history of a military technology.

The discursive theory of power has already been explored to a degree in this book. This is a much less squishy notion than culture; instead, episteme makes it concrete which terms seem to be operating in society and how they come to take on a role akin to an object. Foucault’s theory of power is thus bidirectional—it is the way that discourses are produced and manage society in any number of ways, ranging from the disciplining effects of a prison to the ostensibly empowering effects of education. Instead of power functioning on the basis of whom could be threatened or even killed, power could produce populations and improve the quality of life. That said, people might want to strategically reverse power relations, to take hold of material and organizational forms that could improve their lives. But Wendy Brown has persuasively argued that the wounded attachments produced by progressive demands on power may backfire, driving resentment and, worse, revenge.^[95]

How, then, should we study the impact of power? Power is best understood through a combination of approaches, including the logistical ways in which communication/media produces a selection of physical effects (in both the mechanical and natural worlds), the properties of the texts in circulation, and the ways that people understand those interactions in their lived experience. There is no simple rejection of power or deconstruction of disciplinary mechanisms, but instead a complex and fluid system of relations that produce the worlds that we may or may not want to live in. Metaphors for water are particularly relevant. As Joseph Dawson Bookman argued, the central logistical media technology of modernity is not radio or electricity but plumbing itself. Turning to the discursive, abandoning the physical practical dimension of power, is just as much of a mistake as ignoring that there is no outside of discourse. In other words, a meaningful analysis of power requires a comprehensive, multidimensional investigation.

User interfaces themselves are a form of power. Shannon Mattern critiques the dashboard, where extreme dimensionality reduction is employed to produce a single data-based graphic about a system to facilitate its management.^[96] A dashboard can convince a high-modernist that they know much more than they really do, as if a city is a playable object. When we are “seeing like a state,” to riff on James C. Scott, we are seeing through a dashboard.^[97] Plotnick’s history of buttons gets at the anxiety about button technologies (both on the screen and physical buttons). What would it mean for society if great deals of physical work were done via a simple press of a button rather than gross physical exertion? Plotnick argues, “The most vocal concerns about buttons manifest in relation to people whose fingers on the button occupy positions of privilege and that they abuse those privileges—by using those buttons unethically, by sending other to do their work, by taking lives without thinking about it, and by commanding from a relaxed position while others sweat and toil.”^[98]

Power as a ubiquitous and negative force is a common trope. Pessimism as an academic feeling is disempowering, totalizing, and gives up on the interface of politics and the political. It sells books. That said, the solution is not to assume that everything is awesome and that those suffering simply need a croissant. Future approaches call for a broad consideration of the desirable. Imagining possible futures and debating their desirability are essential mechanisms for designing the future, one that transcends the needless pessimism that so easily is passed off as deep theorizing.

1.13. Memory and Affect

Memory is organized and disorganized. It is accurate but also riddled with errors. Memory would seem to include both explicit and implicit, episodic and semantic. Endel Tulvig developed a great body of this theory, and his perspective on memory is telling:

With one singular exception, time’s arrow is straight. Unidirectionality of time is one of nature’s most fundamental laws. It has relentlessly governed all happenings in the universe—cosmic, geological, physical, biological, psychological—as long as the universe has existed. Galaxies and stars are born and they die, living creatures are young before they grow old, causes always precede effects, there is no return to yesterday, and so on and on. Time’s flow is irreversible.

The singular exception is provided by the human ability to remember past happenings. When one thinks today about what one did yesterday, time’s arrow is bent into a loop. The rememberer has mentally traveled back into her past and thus violated the law of the irreversibility of the flow of time. She has not accomplished the feat in physical reality, of course, but rather in the reality of the mind, which, as everyone knows, is at least as important for human beings as is the physical reality. When Mother Nature watches her favorite creatures turning one of her immutable laws on its head, she must be pleased with her own creativity.^[99]

Tulvig is poetic; time travel here refers to episodic memory, which is the way that people might remember events. Semantic memory refers to the memory of particular facts or ideas, which are not organized in the same way. Memory is not a singular function; it is not a recording of events, but multiple distinct systems that encode information in different ways. Consensus would support an embodied theory of cognition that includes the entire enfolding of culture, body, and technology—this is a clear connection point between communication and psychology.^[100] The sciences and the humanities are well aligned, not in opposition. Although the physical mechanisms of memory are not well understood, there are clear organizational patterns in memory systems, with memories being encoded on the basis of space, time, and similarity.^[101] A practical concern, raised regularly for at least 3,000 years, is the degree to which media might disorganize memory or even lead to decreased memory generally. The news is mixed; when replaced with technology, some specific memory functions decline, but generally there is no support for a decrease in memory capacity.^[102] Rather than denying the role of media research on memory, the case is clear that we should research how memory structures change.

Consider the role of memory in developing AI. If one accepts a fully computational view of the psyche, it would stand to reason that computer memory and biological memory are roughly interchangeable in an artificial mind, with an infinite supply of perfect (as opposed to flawed biological) memory, and easily capable of life. The problem is that this misunderstands the role of memory—it is not simply a record but an active element in consciousness, connecting and flowing in multiple distinct ways. If we were to ask an artificial agent to write a memoir, it would be an overflowing list of information. Changing the structure of memory for artificial agents is a major domain of research and improvement for those systems, with six essential memory operations: consolidation, updating, indexing, forgetting, retrieval, and compression.^[103] Underlying this framework is a structure of parametric (specific, concrete structural insights) and contextual (unstructured data) memories. What is especially interesting to consider is that this framework for AI memory is at odds with the infinitely expanding large language model (LLM) framework—consolidation and forgetting reduce dimensionality.

Situating this within philosophical and political theory is actually helpful for humanistic theories of communication. We could understand communication today in two debates, one between Hegelian positions, which suppose that rationality is driving the social forward (thus the scientific socialism of Marx and Engles), versus passion (thus Kirkegaard). Kirkegaard is the first pole of the other side, where Kirkegaard would be opposed to Freud; as for Kirkegaard, the way that we learn about reality is through reminiscence, and for Freud it is repetition.

It would make sense for double majors in psychology that this section would seem somewhat jarring. Don’t worry, social science is returning in a few lines. This humanistic view can offer students a great deal of understanding for those parts of our communication world that are not well understood through social science. Repetition of passionate attachments, ostensibly with no end, are what a Lacanian would call drives. Rather than theorizing from a scientific perspective and thus throwing away millennia of human experience, we might understand memory as it is in our lives and very minds. Science, rather than offering rigorous account of the world, would be involved in absurd dimensionality reduction, fanciful metaphor, and an obsession with instrumentation. Access to memory would come through literature, poetry, and art—not a questionnaire deployed via a system that pays people nickels to answer questions.

Affect theory is especially important at this intersection. Lauren Berlant argues that intimacy is at the point where personal feelings intersect with public structures.^[104] The ways that people experience the world, broader trends, the economy—everything is profoundly personal and even “sensual”:

The immediacy of trauma is always sensual, but it is as likely to be a mass-mediated event, an event of hearsay and post facto witnessing, as it is to be a direct blow to the body; and we can see from trauma’s current prevalence as an occasion for testimony how shocking it is when an intimate relation is animated by sheer devastation.^[105]

Affect theory breaks down the separation in analysis between what we feel, how we think, and how society is structured. As a holistic mode of explanation, it offers a great deal for understanding how public culture literally fells. In Cruel Optimism, Berlant offers a compelling reading of the ways that the promise of the future that was never delivered impacts so many people.^[106] Paul Elliott Johnson argues that the affective experience of conservatism is a “doomsday machine” that must produce visceral feelings of threat in the public to maintain coherence.^[107]

Collective memories are real and produced through communication practices; this is the dimension of communication as ritual. Collective memory is produced through national rituals, museums, monuments, holidays, and ceremonies.^[108] One does not “remember the Alamo” as anything other than a collective element of Texan identity. In contrast, September 11 is in living memory, which does not mean that collective memories of it are not profoundly mediated. What details are included in the day, which images are circulated or not circulated, even the narrativization of four separate attacks into a single cohesive event is mediated. In terms of the basic narrative structure and consolidation of memory in the context of war, there are clearly demonstrable core elements that are stronger in the past.^[109] Collective misremembering is real; people dramatically overestimate the length of the COVID lockdowns, often by a factor of 10, and they misremember during what years the pandemic occurred as well as who was president.^[110] This is just one example—collective memory is always retroactive. On a much smaller level, priming theory supposes that activating memory processes might shape the understanding of new information. On the surface, this feels like a good explanation and matches our experience of reality. The challenge is in the reproducibility of the underlying research—priming is a major venue in the reproducibility crisis in social psychology (more on this later).^[111]

1.14. Attention and Publicity

Attention has been a central issue of communication research for decades. Herbert Simon noted that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Attention is an effect structure, not a cause, per Wayne Wu, a cognitive scientist reviewing the literature on attention.^[112] What is especially striking in Wu’s review are the 45,000-plus studies of attention and their failure to arrive at a unified field theory, which is not a problem. The solution to the problem is then to see attention as an effect structure, meaning it is the “selecting a target to guide a response.” If this feels strange, it is because it is an answer to the more radical concept from Bernhard Hommel and colleagues, that “no one knows what attention is.”^[113] You may realize at this point that this is not first and foremost a psychology book. Whatever your take on the nature of the thing that selects your focus, attention is important.

Public sphere theory is very much a theory of attention. Jurgen Habermas, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, discusses the ways that publicity produces an “inarticulate readiness” for action.^[114] Theories of the public sphere are really theories of attention that direct arguers toward particular kinds of appeals and various rules of engagement. Rhetorical theory in this context is the accretion of the empirical reality of media effects. The wisdom of 10,000 meetings well run is worldly. Walter Lippmann, in developing the framework for what would be journalism, built a theory of good attention.^[115] In opposition to the publicity processes of the public are counter-publics, which are formed by “mere attention.”^[116] Counter-public theory argues that rather than the public sphere function being primarily a matter of a single overarching circulation that in the context of communication exists, much of what we understand to be the public sphere is really the product of overlapping claims between different groups.^[117] Beyond challenging the single public sphere model, there are many other arguments of interest, from challenges to decorum, to considerations of the visibility of arguers, to historical investigations into whether the public sphere existed in the first place.^[118] Cara A. Finnegan and Jiyeon Kang argue in their landmark article on iconoclasm that public sphere theory has an internal regulating discourse on images—that traditional public sphere theorists reject imagery in favor of text.^[119] They argue that moves forward in public sphere theory integrate the visual such as public screen theory hold promise as they move beyond a purely textual theory of communication, which can more broadly consider the ways that people participate in public life..^[120] Some have extended this public screen theory to the ways that arguers might control the code of the screen itself as a matter of publicity.^[121] A second important insight from Finnegan and Kang is that mediation should be understood in visual rhetoric alongside recirculation.^[122] Why such an addition? Recirculation is not challenging for the public sphere; an image could enter into circulation, be read in a variety of straightforward ways, and take its place alongside iconic text and possibly speech.^[123] Mediation recognizes the power of the image to dramatically expand possible readings, to demand more attention than the close reading of any document ever could. Political communication has no idea what attention is, but also it really does.

The attention economy supposes that the scarcity of attention is the primary organizational factor in the economy.^[124] Although advertising is a relatively small industry, the effects of how information is organized can be profound. Choosing who the president is can mean much more than the relative increase or decrease in sales of any particular widget. There is a lot of important truth here: there are only so many hours in the day and so much energy to engage with television (delivered via a Roku TV or on a TikTok feed). As of this writing, a popular idea is Gen Z trend burnout, the idea that we have now so far exceeded the capacity of young people to chase trends that burnout itself is now the trend.^[125] Optimistic versions of this idea tend to foreground the ecological and human costs of trend chasing, such as the demise of Forever 21 and low-quality fast-fashion. Or perhaps just as the millennials and all generations before, young people are getting older. Of particular interest is theory of platform decay, where the incentives for platform operators are not well aligned with the users. Platforms produce value for themselves by switching trend spaces and then aligning consumer demand. To put this in the context of public sphere theory, G. Thomas Goodnight was right: “get a lifeworld.”^[126] Attention is not merely for newscasts and committee hearings—but also for all the parts of our lives that, per a view of the public sphere as publicity, are connected. Tarleton Gillespie’s idea that “moderation is the product” hits home, as there is no natural social media absent moderation. There are only the moderation choices that select the topics, the rate of topic change, and the possibility of topic exhaustion.^[127] All of these options are a glut, so many options that decision, much less attention, becomes impossible. Intentional overproduction was a central aspect of the television and cinema industries, so too for social media. This was Mark Andrejevic’s central theory in Infoglut: that the mechanisms of audience research, rapid reproduction, and automated diffusion would only produce the same outcome.^[128] This can be seen in some of the struggle with AI development today—the answer is always more, even when it clearly isn’t.

One final sense of attention to consider is the philosophical distinction between interested and disinterested attention. An important precept for developing aesthetic theory is the separation of aesthetic judgment from entirely personal preference. Interested judgments might include the ways that we see ourselves in works, the ways that those connections could become our work product as communication professionals, and even the prestige we place in ourselves as critics. Disinterested judgment would suppose that we might bracket those interests and evaluate the universal. Beauty is important, people seek it, it is to use artist Wayne White’s word “embarrassing.”^[129] The excess in our aesthetic perception could overcome our ability to contain it, and we could be betrayed by our movement. In some sense this is why dwell time as a mechanic in social media systems is so difficult for users. They merely watched the beautiful dancing person; they did not click, comment, or share it.

The fundamental risk of media today is that we have sublime all the time. Conversely, we don’t want to commit the same theoretical fallacies as those who came before. Lower attention spans have been decried for many years, despite a complete lack of evidence and objective evidence that people have indeed gotten smarter.^[130] In this sense, what we might notice is the lack of capacity in the public sphere to account for emotional processing; the Jerry Springer show may have actually done more good than we would ever know.^[131] We could also distinguish between zero-sum uses of attention. Rather than make claims of media effects on organ of attention itself, we could understand the mechanisms that focus attention. Thus the problem with “sublime all the time” is not that seeing things makes people worse, but that the information ecology of the system has fundamentally changed a distinction between infrastructures and perception.

1.15. Information

Communication has a love/hate relationship with information theory. Clearly, communication regards information and is often understood to be signal processing. That said, information consists of far more than signal processing, including the study of documentation and of becoming informed. If we allow communication to become information and information to be reduced to signal processing, so much explanatory power is lost. This is also known as the conduit metaphor for communication.^[132] Speakers do not exist in a vacuum; they are actively participating by speaking, co-creating communication both actively through nonverbal and other channel dynamics, and through their very act of listening. The words themselves are unstable, and meanings are probabilistic. At the same time, we don’t want to lose the ways that information theory can tell us about communication or metaphorically explain the universe. As Jame Gleick noted, “Information is uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy.”^[133] Further, cybernetic theories of communication have been particularly helpful in understanding contemporary technology and in developing the ways that surveillance shapes the lifeworld.^[134] Integrating information theory inverts the view from media studies that meaning is abundant. It is precisely the opposite: the universe is constantly pushing us toward meaninglessness.

Situating information processing within the communication-information space broadly is essential. As of this writing, the word “squabble” does not mean an argument but refers to dancing to “squabble up.” Michael K. Buckland structured other senses of information as a 2 × 2 matrix, which I reproduce here in a sense.^[135]

The intersection of communication and information as fields is rich and valuable. We would thus teach people how they encounter documents as well as how they might come to know things. Evaluating the knowledge itself is far more difficult. It is no accident that so many important studies in media history are studies of documentary systems. Consider Lisa Gitelman’s history of the PDF file, which is central to media theory from a historical vantage point, as it describes how we might come to understand entire systems of knowledge that hinge on the ways that we might process data.^[136] Suddenly it makes sense why communication researchers would be so interested in how we package and move information just as much as in the information itself.

Search engine studies are an important subfield for consideration. How do we organize our documents or our social traces? Safiya Umoja Nobel, in her foundational work Algorithms of Oppression, argues that bias related to race, gender, sex, and more is transmitted through the structure of information in our search engines and libraries.^[137] The essential innovation of Google was to treat information as a social network rather than as a natural language problem. Instead of solving the problem of knowledge, the search engine relied on the continuous need of people to want to become informed; of course, this lovely ecosystem coincidence was just as tenuous as newspaper classified sections paying for the production of meaningful journalism. Search engine optimization manipulated the network with fake links, and the advertising mechanisms that pay for search engines inspire firms to produce context that displaces the real center nodes, even the firms themselves, through automated summary systems. Information systems that organize knowledge are not neutral or objective; they are political mechanisms that intervene into the uncertain.

Misinformation studies have been central in media research for over a decade. While it is already discussed in the theory of ideology presented in this book, the informational value of misinformation is very real. It is not simply a question of some bad documents being included in our media systems, if only it were as simple as identifying the bad documents and purging them from the database. Rather, the challenge is that there are people who have fundamentally diverging views of the world. The intangible value of knowledge is falling away into the processes and the documents. Much like how the search engine could no longer fall back onto the social structure of knowledge sites, the idea of a stable set of knowledge to fall back on is specious as there is nothing there at all, just layers of other discourse. Perhaps most interesting, search engines are routinely “improved” by human annotation to make them more “subtle.”^[138] The challenge is that this process of annotation, especially when seen as a form of highly disciplined corporate labor, forces humans to perform algorithmically.

1.16. Analytics

The domain of cultural analytics drives from the labs at Cal Tech and groups organized around Lev Manovich. A central point of this argument comes from Manovich’s classic The Language of New Media. A central aspect of new media is their intrinsic digitality: the media are readily available as data because they are primarily data.^[139] The fundamental challenge this poses is to how we understand media as information. If we might have more sophisticated means for processing the information that we enjoy as media, we can come to a new understanding of the text—more on this in the methods section of this book (section 4).

A tall infographic titled “Pinteresting Weddings” analyzing thousands of wedding-dress images collected from Pinterest. The primary visualization is a large montage of small dress photographs, showing heavy clustering around white dresses. Additional graphics below show zoomed-out distributions emphasizing consistency in color and composition. Accompanying text explains that images were analyzed by color values and dimensions, highlighting differences between white dresses on blue backgrounds and non-white dresses on other backgrounds. The analysis concludes that the average pinned wedding-dress image is highly consistent, portrait-oriented, and visually simple.

Fundamentally, the challenge of cultural analytics is that what was not considered measurable is now measurable. Instead of accepting assertions about what media trends or changes were, we can directly observe them from the older text. This is really a change in the structure of authority, before authority came from the procession of citations. In some academic disciplines, there is high citational inequality and low mobility between institutions, meaning that those disciplines rely on a handful of powerful people at a particular set of institutions to transmit the core of the discipline.^[140] One discipline was found to be structured around a core of four academic departments.^[141] The argument is not that we should throw away all existing knowledge, but that in a world where new methods are available that produce a literal archive that can be accessed and tested, the specific utility of the concentrated centers of the academic network is reduced. At the same time, changes in academic authority are a broader story that includes changes in how we think about theory generally. High theory, especially theories derived from Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, and Lacan, were popular in the postwar environment, replacing older theories that themselves were replacing other theories.^[142] While closure is necessary and inevitable, cultural analytics can be understood as an attempt to make space for exploratory studies and to refresh our thinking.

Per Manovich in his landmark text Cultural Analytics, there are five key ideas:

1. “Cultural analytics refers to the use of computational and design methods— including data visualization, media and interaction design, statistics, and machine learning for exploration and analysis of contemporary culture at scale.”^[143]
2. New vocabularies for describing media.
3. The field at present tends to be visual.
4. An overt attempt to rethink categories in cultural research or avoid them if possible.
5. “Cultural analytics includes not only the application of currently available computational methods for data analysis to cultural datasets and flows, but also critical examination of these data science methods and their assumptions.”^[144]

The connection of this new subfield of art history and film studies is apparent, and real connections to communication research can be developed. Point five of the core program of cultural analytics is a self-reflexive critique. Contrary to some criticisms of this area, the approach is not simply to transfer our work to the computer, but to critique computer science as well. Thus the approach proposed here is both new and old. Notice that the call here is not to engage in social science but to engage in creative, interpretive, and critical practices—this is an expansion of the arts first and possibly humanities. Analytic approaches have changed basic assumptions in literary theory.^[145] Theater is a rich form of data.^[146] Art history has embraced analytic approaches.^[147]

1.17. Flow

It all started in Miami. Raymond Williams turned on a television in an American hotel room. He was from the United Kingdom, where television was different. American television was a sequentially layered presentation. It flowed. This experience was the basis of Williams’s landmark book Television.^[148] The essential character of television and social media is flow.^[149] Instead of focusing on a particular text, television criticism would focus on the ways that program flow constructed a meta-text, an assemblage that had its own structure of feeling. Naturally, television researchers, keeping with the times and always marginal (TV criticism is not Chaucer), moved on to the next obvious thing—the myriad ways that MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter produced flow.

Flow can also mean a flow state, a psychological state that mixes engagement and boredom to allow things to simply side together.^[150] As a theory of positive psychology, flow could help us understand how to create a great user interface, one free of distraction, with the possibilities of jazz. A central finding for flow theory, which helps us understand creativity generally, is that flow is more likely to be experienced during work than leisure.^[151] In short, creativity occurs within constraints, not as a bolt of lightning from nowhere.

Flow can also refer to diffusion. Information flows through the human network.^[152] An entire branch of social science methodology is devoted to social network analysis, a technique essential for developing modern search engines. More on this in section 4.

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