The Mechanization of Meaning

What happens when speech becomes an engineering problem.

One of the themes of Superbloom, my new book, is the recent, dramatic, and largely unheralded expansion of the role of machinery in media. If you think of media as a system for the distribution of speech, you can break it down into three basic roles or functions:

1. Message creation (the speech function)

2. Message selection (the editorial function)

3. Message transmission (the transport function)

From media’s origins in the ancient world up until the early morning hours of September 5, 2006, the way these functions were divided between human beings and machines was clear-cut. People handled the speech and editorial functions, the ones involved in the making of meaning. The role of machinery was limited to the transport function.