A Review of Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence by Elena Esposito
In Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence, Elena Esposito argues that our understanding of communication must be updated to account for the increasing prevalence and sophistication of digital systems¹ in society. Esposito states that, while communication was once understood as something occurring only among humans, this conceptualization does not fit modern communication, as the role of humans has been reduced over time such that the source of a message is often sufficiently decoupled from its recipient and there is “no need” to know who produced a message or why. (p. xi) On this basis (and on that of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems, which centers communication around the recipient of a message rather than its source), Esposito defines artificial communication as any communication involving “an entity…built and programmed to act as a communication partner by someone who does not participate in the communication” (p. 14) and claims that, by employing the lens of artificial communication, digital systems powered by algorithms can be understood in terms of their ability to communicate rather than in terms of their intelligence.
Artificial Communication is divided into seven chapters, the first of which…
