First, our upcoming seminar on Mark Hansen, critique, and the digital has a new time and place for the seminar next week: 13.15-15.00 in N1052V or zoom (https://lnu-se.zoom.us/j/4131583665).

The reason for this change is that LIMO offers a very promising lecture by media scholar Oddgeir Tveiten in Kalmar at 10.15: 21^st century Communication and the Age of AI - centennial canons, concepts and contexts (see more including zoom-link below). Tveiten's lecture speaks to similar qustions and problems that we are dealing with in our seminar, but with a different emphasis.

As a reminder concerning our seminar: under the topic Critique and the digital we are discussing the forms that critique may take in relation to contemporary algorithmic cultures and media environments. To give the conversation a direction we ask you to read Hansen, Mark B. N. ”The Critique of Data, or Towards a Phenomenotechnics of Algorithmic Culture”. I Critique and the Digital, redigerad av Erich Hörl, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, och Lotte Warnsholdt. Critical Stances. Diaphanes, 2021. The seminar will be introduced by Erik Erlanson and Per Israelsson.

Below is the invitation to the LIMO lecture:

We are happy to invite you to the next LiMO research seminar with Oddgeir Tveiten on 25 February 10-12 followed by an informal lunch.

Topic: “21st century communication and the age of AI – centennial canons, concepts and contexts” (abstract, see below)

Please contact LiMO-coordinator Andreas Önnerfors for more information: andreas.onnerfors@lnu.se +46 (0)70 270 27 78

Abstract

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

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.

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 21st 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?