AI, Media, Power, and Control
(How the Economy of Will Will Shape Humanity’s Future)
Why Understanding AI Requires Understanding Media
When discussing AI, most conversations center on efficiency, productivity, or job replacement. These are real concerns, but they stay on the surface.
If we return to an important but often overlooked intellectual tradition. Media Ecology, we encounter a deeper question:
Media is never neutral. It shapes who holds power, how societies organize themselves, and how civilizations remember, forget, and judge.
From this perspective, AI is not just a smarter tool. It is an integrated, meta-level medium.
It absorbs language, images, sound, data, and even decision-making itself.
That is why AI does not merely change how we work. It reshapes the foundations of civilization.
1， How Media Shapes Power and Civilizational Structure
From Innis’s "Time and Space" to Postman’s "Technopoly"
Canadian thinker Harold Innis offered a powerful but counterintuitive idea:Time-biased media. Stability with concentration
Stone inscriptions, clay tablets, parchment. They last a long time but travel poorly.
Such media tend to produce societies that are
- tradition-oriented
- hierarchical,
- dominated by small groups controlling knowledge
The advantage is continuity. The cost is rigidity and concentrated power.
Space-biased media. Expansion with amnesia
Paper, printing, broadcast, and digital networks spread quickly and widely.
They enable states, empires, and corporations to manage large territories and markets. They accelerate competition and growth.
But something is lost. When information moves too quickly, societies begin to lose their sense of identity. History is compressed into headlines, dashboards, and data points.
When technology starts ruling culture
American media critic Neil Postman called this condition Technopoly.
It does not mean technology is advanced. It means culture surrenders its judgment to technology.
When what can be measured becomes the only thing that matters, values, meaning, and responsibility lose their standing.
Human beings are no longer treated as thinking subjects, but as objects to be analyzed, predicted, and optimized.
This is the deepest power shift of the AI age.
2. Media Does Not Just Shape Information. It Shapes How We Think
McLuhan’s Insight. Extension Always Comes with Loss
Media theorist Marshall McLuhan made a crucial observation:
Media is an extension of human faculties, but every extension also creates an imbalance.
From linear thinking to fragmented perception
Reading and writing train logic, causality, and patience.
Electronic and algorithmic media emphasize images, immediacy, and emotional response.
This does not mean people are becoming less intelligent. It means thinking habits are being retrained.
Thinking itself is being outsourced
The internet reduced memory by replacing it with search. AI goes further by replacing analysis with instant output.
The real danger is not thinking less. It is losing awareness of how conclusions are reached.
When people no longer understand their own thinking process, judgment quietly shifts to systems.
3. A Structural Shift. From the Attention Economy to the Economy of Will
For decades, media power revolved around attention. Whoever captured more time and focus gained influence.
AI changes this logic.
Execution is no longer scarce
AI can write, calculate, analyze, and execute. Methods and efficiency are rapidly losing scarcity.
Direction becomes the bottleneck
When almost anything can be done, deciding what is worth doing becomes the rarest resource.
This is what we call the Economy of Will.
AI can help achieve goals. It cannot decide what deserves pursuit.
If humans maintain clear intention, AI can reduce noise and amplify focus.
If intention collapses, AI becomes a system that drains attention and shapes behavior.
4. Facing Technology. Not Rejection, but Human Positioning
Postman did not argue for rejecting technology. He called for becoming “loving resistance fighters.”
Not anti-technology, but unwilling to hand over meaning and judgment.
Preserving human “slow capacities.”
Writing, deep reading, independent reasoning, long-term judgment.
These are not outdated skills. They are structural counterweights to fragmentation.
Technology must serve human meaning
Tools should support human value systems, not replace them.
When tools begin defining goals instead of serving them, civilization loses balance.
So What about Now?
- AI Is a Fast Car. Civilization Needs a Rider
Technology will keep accelerating. The question is never whether it can be stopped.
The question is who holds the direction.
In the AI era, real power will not belong to those with the most information, but to those with the clearest will and intact self-reflection.
As long as the question “Why am I doing this?” remains in human hands, technology remains a tool. Not destiny.