Imagining communities with “intelligent” machines

A recording of the talk can be found here:

Event is hybrid. Participants may attend in person (T6 A136, Computer Science Building, Aalto University) or online on Zoom.

Talk Abstract: 

It has been almost thirty years since the renowned anthropologist and scholar of nationalism, Benedict Anderson, introduced the concept of imagined communities. He referred to the historical processes of collective imagination that contributed to the development of nations and nationalism. Imagining communities is always mediated, and Anderson notes that journalism was instrumental in the development of nationalism. Taking seriously the famous “medium is the message” quip by Marshall McLuhan from in the late sixties, the question is: If newspapers were instrumental in imagining nations, how does our contemporary, complex and commodified media environment now condition our collective imagination? Epistemic institutions have been challenged, media production and consumption hybridized and content confusion is prevailing, just to mention a few of the often listed unintended consequences of contemporary communication technologies.

There is also a deeper transformation taking place for imagining communities. We are no longer just using our media technologies, but they are also using us by collecting our data and anticipating our action based on it. There are innumerable ways in which learning machines already have an impact on how we see the world and each other in it.  The aim of the talk is to illustrate these complexities through empirical examples, and to inspire a discussion on the implications of the learning machines for imagining communities.