The Mechanization of Meaning
Nicholas Carr outlines media as a system for the distribution of communication, inclusive of three parts:
- Message creation (humans)
- Message selection (humans, editorial)
- Message transmission (machines)
No. 3, message transmission, has been playing out in various ways through mechanization:
stringing telegraph or telephone lines across a continent, building switching networks for the routing of phone calls, establishing broadcasting networks for the transmission of radio or television signals, creating protocols for compressing signals or instruments for amplifying them
No. 2, message selection, used to be all human. But when Facebook rolled out the News Feed circa 2006, things started to change. Mechanization began to take over the editorial process.
[Facebook News Feed] automated the selection of messages for distribution to an audience. The editorial function was no longer the exclusive purview of human beings. It had suddenly become part of the engineering problem, a matter of user-profiling systems, prediction algorithms, and other software routines. Even though the machines — networked digital computers — had no sense of meaning themselves, they were now making decisions about meaning, semantic decisions that determine the content people see or do not see.
Soon it wasn’t just Facebook. Everyone began implementing a mechanized (i.e. algorithmic) editorial process. Its effect?
Society, we discovered, was neither prepared for nor capable of addressing the automation of meaning-making.
Then OpenAI released ChatGPT and mechanization reached for the last human process, no. 1: message creation. Now meaning-making isn’t exclusively to humans.
It’s a challenge of our own making and one we’re still entirely unprepared for.
Like so many other things we’ve invented.