21st century communication and the age of AI – centennial canons, concepts and contexts

Innehåll

The opening question is one that an increasing number of researchers and educators in higher education all ask: How are we to understand the meaning of Artificial Intelligence and what do we do with it?

While these concerns seem to point towards philosophy, technology design and education science, they also foundationally address 100 years of communication research as a scholarly field.

Oddgeir Tveiten

The introduction of ChatGPT in 2020’s impacted profoundly on communication institutions and social practice, reminding us that 100 years of communication research – developing models, concepts, theories and paradigms – now stands at a new juncture. The history of communication research is a history of observing the disruptive power of technology. A quarter into the new millennium the extension and intensity of 21^st century communications technology is more profound than ever. Impacts on society and civic webs of meaning now challenge communications research to critically assess canonical models, concepts, and theories: The question is how.

Lofty words such as these might be put to better use through anchoring more concretely and quite pragmatically in already existing debates about these issues: In the presentation, the starting point will be the 1983 special issue Ferment In The Field, published by Journal of Communication, issue edited by George Gerbner. In that volume, contributors looked backwards, sideways and forward in search of answers to where communications research was at, at that time. Later volumes coming out on the same theme represent updates on a fast- expanding global field of research within the humanities and social science, but not with the same discursive force. Not even the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union, rendering the US as the sole superpower, created a comparable intellectual thrust within the communication research community.

To this and to a wide array of subsequent research publications exploring 'ferment', one might ask: Starting with the introduction of '.html code, also in 1989, what's AI got to do with it?

AI not being a new invention, the introduction of 'large language models' such as ChatGPT in 2022 and a host of others, could lead one to argue that not only do existing paradigm assumptions in communication research have to be rewritten (and indeed, are being rewritten); profound ontological and epistemological questions concerning what technology is and does, should be firmly placed on both the research agenda and the education agenda. On that order, what insight and what perspective might a review of key canons in communication research provide?

Nyckelord

Media theory, artificial intelligence, communication research, social change, modernization, dependency, structure and agency in social communication.

Om föreläsaren

Oddgeir Tveiten is professor of media studies at the University of Agder (UIA) in Southern Norway, at the Department of global development and planning. He taught journalism and communication at universities in Ethiopia and Uganda for 15 years, as an adjunct professor at the NLA Gimlekollen School of Journalism, in Norway, where he contributed to the establishment of several MA and PhD programs. At UIA Tveiten founded and still chairs Future Learning Lab, a local and international network of scholars exploring uses and critiques of technology in education and learning. Tveiten holds and MA and a PhD from the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Communication, where he was a Fulbright Scholar for five years and for three years also a teaching assistant in BA courses on communication and public opinion. He is co-founder of the Norwegian Norsk Medietidsskrift. Before coming to UIA, he was associate professor at the University of Bergen, as well as project researcher at the University of Oslo.

The current presentation is an outline of what is intended to become a book for publication in 2028.