A more-than-human process

Throughout this book, we’ll consider how technology extends our capacity to communicate and collaborate with others. The impacts and demands of technological change may be the very reason you’re reading this book. Many students come to the study of communication because they are fascinated by such change or need to equip themselves to deal with it. As communicators in the 21st century, we must constantly retrain ourselves and develop the new skills needed to flourish in a media landscape that is constantly shifting under our feet.

This does not mean, however, that the study of communication is – or should be – solely focused on technology. We should be wary of technological determinist positions that assume technology alone shapes (determines) change. And we should not conflate communication with the tools that allow us to communicate.

In other words, communication is more than TikTok or Instagram. It is more than a press release. It is more than an app and more than a phone. All of these are channels, tools, platforms, products, or spaces within which or through which communication takes place. But what is interesting and vital about communication goes beyond tools and across platforms. If you were designing a communication strategy, you would do more than provide a list of tools, platforms, or devices – you would think carefully and deeply about tactics for reaching and engaging real people, and you would craft your message to achieve your desired impact, making choices about what to include and what to foreground.

If we think about communication only in terms of apps, platforms, and devices, we are looking in the wrong places, because communication is really about people. The media theorist David Gauntlett made a similar argument in 2008 when he stated that the discipline of media studies was too concerned with “media” at the expense of “people”.

When we study communication, we are interested in what people do with technological tools and how they interact with other people in everyday contexts, even when they are communicating in mediated or virtual spaces. We should not erase people from the study of communication – indeed, in the midst of so much focus on “tech”, we should reclaim people and re-place them within the emerging communication concepts that define our time.

But non-human entities can also communicate…

Photo by Google DeepMind from Pexels. According to Pexels, this image “visualises the input and output of neural networks and how AI systems perceive data”, and is credited to DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence research laboratory.

In June 2023, the MEAA – the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, a regulatory body for communication in Australia – raised concerns about the Generative AI tool ChatGPT writing content for a regional Victorian newspaper, the South Gippsland Sentinel Times. ChatGPT was even given its own byline and thereby identified as the “sender” or “communicator” of these news texts.

This example is not an outlier or an anomaly. Three years prior, in 2020, Microsoft sacked dozens of journalists from its MSN news portal and replaced them with AI software. As CNN reported in 2023, the decision resulted in errors and ethical breaches that would likely have been picked up by human editorial staff. These included news coverage of a young woman’s death that asked readers to vote on how the victim died through an AI-generated poll.

News is not the only industry impacted by this blurring of the boundary between human and non-human communicators. In July 2023, the world’s first human-robot press conference was held in Geneva. Human journalists asked questions of generative-AI-enhanced robot spokespeople, covering topics such as how artificial intelligence is working to solve global challenges like disease and food security, and whether AI should be regulated. Just as remarkable as the topics under discussion was the simple fact that AI-powered machines were engaging in what was previously considered to be a very human act of communication – giving a press conference. (You can read more about the event in this story by the ABC.)

Meanwhile, prompt engineering as a communication practice is increasingly relevant to thinkers, communicators, and creators of all kinds, regardless of their degree of professional communication training.

This mainstreaming of AI as a tool and the widening of its applicability has fascinating consequences when it comes to traditional models of communication. A human using ChatGPT is certainly the “user” of a media product, and thus a type of “audience” or “receiver”; but they are also a communicator for whom the AI becomes a type of audience (the receiver of the person’s message or prompt). Together, the human user and the AI tool collaborate as senders, producing content for others.

In a similar vein, John Gallagher has written about algorithms as audiences for the writers of online content. If you’re writing or creating content for a platform like YouTube, Gallagher argues, you’ll likely be thinking of your audience as the various types of people who will watch your videos – but if you’re a skilled creator of online content, you’ll also be thinking about how you can make sure your content is seen widely and how you can increase its circulation. In this sense, you’re thinking of your audience as both groups of human people and the non-human processes by which online content is sorted and organised, and therefore evaluated (see Gallagher 2017; 2020).

For a long time, communication has been understood to be a human process, but developments today are demanding that we ask: what are the limits on who can communicate? And what does communication look like in the posthuman age, when AI tools can “share meaning” in an advanced and impactful way across a variety of professional and creative contexts?

Communication beyond the human

And let’s not forget that non-human animals can also communicate. They do so in a variety of ways: through sound, touch, visual signs, and chemical transfers – in other words, animals communicate in ways that are very human and also beyond human. And as humans, our own embodied and sensory interactions with nature can be described as a type of meaning-sharing.

Our digital and mediatised communication practices, meanwhile, have deep effects on the natural world. Consider the carbon emissions of data centres, or the global accumulation of electronic waste.

So perhaps it is more apt to describe communication as a more-than-human process – a process that includes but also extends beyond human people.

Cultural ecologist David Abram coined the term “more-than-human world” to describe our planet as an earthly and natural place that includes humankind and our non-human kin (2012). Inspired by Abram’s phrase, I am using it in a slightly different way here to demonstrate that communication is an emplaced and embodied practice that can include humans as well as non-human digital tools, and encompasses the impacts of mediated communication on the planet.