Agency, Affordances, and Enculturation of Augmentation Technologies

TL;DR

This paper critically examines how augmentation technologies, especially AI and non-human agents, are becoming culturally embedded through marketing and societal influences, questioning their assumed benefits.

Contribution

It offers a critical analysis of the enculturation process of augmentation technologies and explores the societal and communicative factors shaping their adoption.

Findings

AI terminology is often ambiguous, complicating understanding.

Marketing strategies play a key role in enculturating users.

Emergent non-human agents influence social and economic contexts.

Abstract

Augmentation technologies are undergoing a process of enculturation due to many factors, one being the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), or what the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) terms the AI wave or AI boom. Chapter 3 focuses critical attention on the hyped assumption that sophisticated, emergent, and embodied augmentation technologies will improve lives, literacy, cultures, arts, economies, and social contexts. The chapter begins by discussing the problem of ambiguity with AI terminology, which it aids with a description of the WIPO Categorization of AI Technologies Scheme. It then draws on media and communication studies to explore concepts such as agents, agency, power, and agentive relationships between humans and robots. The chapter focuses on the development of non-human agents in industry as a critical factor in the rise of augmentation technologies. It looks at how marketing communication enculturates future users to adopt and adapt to the technology. Scholars are charting the significant ways that people are drawn further into commercial digital landscapes, such as the Metaverse concept, in post-internet society. It concludes by examining recent claims concerning the Metaverse and augmented reality.