| Intelligent media supported by intelligent technologies have embedded people's daily life in almost every aspects.Human and media are "involved" in each other and cannot be separated.Such a new form of intelligent media,in which all things are mediated and human-computer symbiotic,is impacting the media concepts of traditional media research.The three major media technology views in traditional media technology research are "as media of neutral tools","as media of ordination entity",and "as media of ideology" have not been able to explain the complex relationship between new forms of media technology and human in today's intelligent era.In the era of intelligence,media technologies on the one hand bring people a convenient and efficient way of life,so as to free people from tedious,repetitive and alienated labor;on the other hand,they also seem to emerge an "out of control" situation owing to artificial intelligence's simulation capabilities have made human feel uncontrollable.With respect to the attitude of intelligent media,one side is the cheer of the liberation of the flesh,and the other is the lamentation of the imprisonment of the soul.The technology utopia is in sympathy with the technology dystopia,directly demonstrating human' complex psychology for the intelligent era.Therefore,how could we understand the media technology of the intelligence era?What is the relationship between media technology and human society in the intelligent era?Based on the above research background and research questions,this paper starts from two angles to answer the question why the traditional media technology research lost its explanatory power in the intelligent era:On the one hand,starting from reflecting the media research concept of the traditional era,especially why the long-term dominant concept of "media as a neutral tool" held by the mainstream Empirical Functionalism has failed to explain the era of intelligence media?This article introduces Andrew Feenberg,a descendent scholar in the United States of the Frankfurt School,who tried to re-understand the tension relationship between technology,nature,and humanity:from his technical critical theory and answered the root of technical essentialism in the traditional concept of "media as tools" and "media as substantive" which lack of understanding of the social nature of the technology and the generation context;On the other hand,starting from the characteristics of the media technology in the intelligent era,it is explored that the intelligent technology has given rise to a series of major changes for intelligent production of the media form,such as intelligent content production,personalized push of algorithms,distribution of multi-scene platforms,immersive receiving terminals,and so on,so as to have completely formed the relationship of "involvement“of humans and media.Afterwards,this study returned to the study's question at the very beginning,namely,how could media research in the era of intelligence be possible?This article thoroughly studies Feenberg's critical theory of technology,and explores what new research approaches media research formed by Feenberg in the era of computer and artificial intelligence can provide for the media research in the current intelligent era.Feenberg re-examined the essence of technology and thought that technology has two layers of essence:the primary instrumentalization and the secondary instrumentalization.Traditional media concepts only discussed at the primary level but ignore the secondary level with social contexts.In essence,it is proposed that computer technologies such as computers and artificial intelligence all have the duality of being "a control tool" and"communication medium",and the attitude towards technology has thus led to the third path instead of "acceptance or abandonment",which is to open the technology "black box" so as to fully understand the internal logic of technology and technology code,and pursue the realistic path of democratization of transformation technology. |
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