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Currently, human society is transitioning from the traditional network era to a deeply mediated era. Information technologies represented by immersive social media and modern digital technologies are penetrating all aspects of society, reshaping the communication and cultural landscape of modern society. The emergence of ChatGPT has once again had a significant impact on the changes in the media environment, social environment, and social ecology. Throughout the history of artificial intelligence development, ChatGPT can be seen as a key step in the transition from weak artificial intelligence to strong artificial intelligence, with its greatest breakthrough being the transition from artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) to artificial general intelligence (AGI). The development of technologies such as virtual reality, social robots, generative artificial intelligence, and big data algorithms is redefining the types and boundaries of communication. As media technology permeates the fabric of everyday society, the relationships between people, machines, information dissemination, and social structures are gradually evolving towards deep coupling, and the human-machine relationship in a deeply mediated environment is being redefined, exhibiting new characteristics of flow, mutual shaping, and symbiosis.
The “human-machine” relationship has always been an important issue in communication studies because “media itself is the hub of interaction between humans and non-humans.” From a traditional binary perspective, the relationship between the communicator and technology (humans and machines) is seen as separate. However, in the deeply mediated era where humans and machines are mutually constitutive subjects, a “spectrum of deep mediation” has formed, with humans and machines at either end, reshaping the role of machines in the human-machine relationship. On one hand, machines no longer appear merely as intermediary tools; they become communicative subjects participating in social processes. On the other hand, in the “human-machine” communication process, machines can also engage in meaning creation and context construction. Based on this, this article attempts to explore the authentic relationship of human-machine interaction in the deep mediation ecology from the perspective of affordance, reinterpreting the “human-machine” communication community.
From Function to Possibility: Profound Changes in Human-Machine Communication in the Deeply Mediated Era
In the current deeply mediated era, “media” has transcended its role as a tool for information carrying and transmission. The interconnectedness of people, content, machines, and the world has risen from traditional physical connections to physiological and psychological levels of interconnectedness. The elements of communication have become further enriched, and the structure of communication has become increasingly complex and ecological. Ecological psychologist James Gibson proposed the concept of affordance in the 1980s. Gibson emphasized that the relationship between humans and objects is not merely a “stimulus-response” dichotomy; affordance represents the authentic relationship between organisms and their environment. Wellman introduced the concept of “social affordance,” understanding it as the possibilities that technology or objects provide to society, which also establishes the theoretical tone for most research utilizing the concept of affordance in communication studies. However, due to the functionalist paradigm tradition in communication studies, humans and technology are still viewed as instrumental roles in the media environment, essentially remaining a binary relationship, or as the extent to which subjects creatively utilize tools.
If one tries to break out of the functionalist framework, as well as the oscillation between social constructivism and technological determinism, and return to the body and perception itself, as well as the original intention of the human-machine relationship, then Leonardi’s view of affordance is more appropriate, as it provides a method for understanding the interaction between humans and technology. Furthermore, intersubjectivity is also central to affordance, representing a “multifaceted relational structure” that enables or constrains certain potential behaviors. According to Evans et al.’s analysis of the concept of affordance in communication studies, the “relationship” described by affordance is the relationship between humans’ perceptions of their machine environment, existing within a dynamic range that possesses enabling and constraining properties that can influence human behavior. However, affordance cannot directly determine human behavior; humans remain active agents within the technological environment. Thus, affordance is a process concept that can describe the multiple ways in which human behavior may change in a machine environment. In the deeply mediated era, humans interact not only with machines but also with a rich mediated environment and space. If we use ecological terminology to explain, the human-machine relationship in the mediated era must be established on the basis of the scene information available to humans in machine contexts and the diversity of responses after information exposure. It is essential to focus on both the capabilities of media technology itself and human objectives, exploring affordance that embodies both directional and relational attributes between the two. In the AGI era, the media technology’s reshaping of society through mediation is inherently inseparable from the social affordance between new technologies and humans, representing the potential for enhanced individual freedom and further expansion of social connections. From “function” to “possibility,” the concept of affordance opens up new perspectives for media research, which is more aligned with the realities of the current mediated environment of the AGI era.
The Human-Machine Relationship from the Perspective of Affordance: Flow, Mutual Shaping, and Symbiosis
Hegel once said, “Relationship is the unity of self-connection and the connection with other things; all things that exist are in relationship.” Affordance is also an objective existence closely related to humans. In a mediated environment, affordance maximally summarizes the human-machine relationship. Whether or not machines are used or connected with mediated organizations, affordance signifies the opportunities for human action within a mediated environment, providing freedom of action for humans in such an environment. As human-machine interconnection evolves from the physical connections of the traditional media era to the AGI era, the boundaries of human-machine interaction are gradually becoming blurred. Accurately clarifying the interactions between humans and machines is a crucial step in achieving a “multi-value cycle” for both parties. The three important characteristics of affordance—dynamic variability, enabling and constraining possibilities, and objective practical existence—offer insightful implications for understanding the flow of human-machine relationships in mediated environments, the mutual shaping between subjects and objects, and the symbiosis between humans and machines.
(1) Flow: The Human-Machine Relationship is Not Fixed by Machine Functions
In the deeply mediated era, the survival status of humans is no longer considered an independent factor above objects; rather, it transforms into a communication node that generates multidimensional data within the information network, achieving synchronous connections and interactions with various objects and content resources. This implies that the human-machine relationship is not a fixed connection but a fluid connection. Affordance serves as the soil for the human-machine relationship, framing the threshold for connection based on humans’ subjective interpretations of objective objects and the objective attributes of machines, defining the degree of potential possibilities. Humans possess self-awareness of these possibilities and can freely choose their relationship with machines according to their judgments of the mediated environment and their self-directed purposes. In the deeply mediated era, the development of the internet has formed a decentralized distributed network, where everything is interconnected, embedding humans and machines within an organic digital ecosystem. When the mediated environment becomes a vast system, machines connect humans and the mediated environment, providing certain possibilities for action; humans generate demands, initiating socialized existence within the mediated environment. At this point, the logic of media ecology shifts from “human-human” to “human-machine-human,” and the fundamental relationship between media development and human society undergoes new transformations due to changes in the human-machine relationship. This ongoing state of affordance aligns with the current reality of humans’ multi-mediated immersive existence in the mediated environment. Therefore, the human-machine relationship in the AGI era is a fluid relationship rather than a fixed connection.
(2) Mutual Shaping: Humans and Machines Can Shape Each Other Through Interaction
Gibson has always emphasized the positivity, embodiment, and wholeness of human perceptual activities. In the process from perception to action, humans possess a significant degree of agency. The changing relationship between humans and machines is closely related to affordance. Bauman once mentioned that when computers were created, few believed they would become part of social life; however, once computers were connected to the internet, people began to utilize the affordance provided by technology, transforming it into a social resource. Furthermore, the higher-level affordance of technology is derived from the initial affordance extended by humans, such as live-streaming technology evolving from the ability to break time and space constraints to the possibilities of simulating consumption environments, further releasing the affordance of this technology.
Additionally, big data and the internet of everything place humans and objects within the same information space, making humans one of the organic molecules in this ecological environment. Apart from actively using technology, shaping machines is another approach. For instance, every search, click, and interaction by users on social networks accumulates data for the platform, which can then create more connection possibilities based on user behavior data and algorithms. Humans’ knowledge as the content of subjects can also be materialized into the knowledge content of computers. This represents a form of humans reshaping the media. Although humans and machines are two different value elements, from the perspective of affordance, both essentially represent different manifestations of “human value.” Taking the use of ChatGPT as an example, on the surface, it is the machine answering human questions, but conversely, it is also a process of the machine learning human behavior. Intelligent technology extends human cognition, and as humans and machines empower, enrich, and enhance each other, they gradually move towards integration and mutual shaping.
(3) Symbiosis: The Coordination of Human-Machine Relationships is Implicit in Explicit Behaviors
The machines in the human-machine relationship include various robots that interact with humans to provide assistance, as well as, in a broader sense, sensors, intelligent technologies, and smart media. Affordance is not merely a characteristic of technology or a result of its use, but a possibility. This means that when humans use technology, they do not attempt to think about what the affordance of technology is; therefore, the intersubjectivity between the two is not explicit. In other words, users may experience emotional technology or become “social actors,” as if the tools themselves are social existences, and this experience can even be unconscious.
“When humans and the world become one, technology becomes implicit,” the coordination of the human-machine relationship is implicit in the explicit behaviors of using intelligent machines. People have become accustomed to the existence of various machines and their structures. McLuhan’s idea that “media are extensions of humans” is genuinely reflected in the current human condition; only when the phone runs out of battery or Wi-Fi is disconnected do people realize that the possibilities for action also disappear. Therefore, affordance is the true manifestation of the human-machine relationship hidden behind usage behaviors, and it is the fundamental attribute of constructing the human-machine relationship. In the AGI era, the relationship between humans and machines is, in fact, a coordinated symbiotic relationship. In a deeply mediated society, the coupling of the two directly determines the ways in which humans survive and act. Whether in the metaverse or ChatGPT, every advancement in media technology aims to address some of the current issues in human society, with the common goal of helping society transition from the initial information interconnection to value sharing. Thus, the symbiosis between humans and machines is both “normative” and “inevitable,” where machines form multi-dimensional perceptions of humans, and humans express their behaviors through machines. As media further embed into the human living environment, communication subjects and media technology subjects will become “co-subjects,” and the human-machine relationship will not be a fragmented separation, but a unified symbiotic existence.
New Connections, Structures, and Deep Mediation: A New Paradigm for the Coordinated Development of Human-Machine Relationships
Media and humans often form intersubjectivity through mutual negotiation and dialogue, continuously unfolding new social practices. With the integration of human-machine models, the humanoid consciousness and cognitive abilities of artificial intelligence are continuously improving, gradually breaking down the boundaries and two-dimensional relationships between humans and machines, forming a “composite common subject” of human bodies, thoughts, emotions, and technology. Similarly, the innovation of the relationship patterns between humans and machines will further reshape the ways in which humans connect with each other, as well as the environment and structure of society. In the AGI era, as human-machine relationships move towards flow, mutual shaping, and symbiosis, the collaborative mechanisms between humans and society, media and society as an environmental community are also gradually emerging. This will be concentrated in the following three aspects: the increasing connection value and status of humans under social logic, the gradual iteration and improvement of social structures under institutional logic, and the gradual initiation of the deep mediation process of society under technological logic.
(1) New Connections: The Transition from the “Cognitive Era” to the “Experiential Era”
In the “Cognitive Era,” the process of socialization and cultivation of knowledge systems is achieved through cognitive information. Understanding the unknown through interpersonal communication and mass communication channels is a typical feature of individuals in the cognitive era. However, during this stage, the world recognized by humans is still incomplete, often limited to certain aspects of knowledge. The richness of information that individuals can obtain through their various sensory experiences far exceeds the content accessible through a simple “cognition-acquisition” model, while the machines at this stage can only activate limited perceptual channels such as visual or auditory.
In the era where “everything is media,” intelligent media technologies establish extensive connections between people, technology, and the environment, providing new sensory supplies for individuals, extending the original “semi-immersive” human-machine connection to physiological dimensions and psychological spaces, achieving deep connections and resonances between sensory dimensions and the nervous system. Thus, humans exist in an immersive, high-fidelity, virtual-real integrated space, transforming unknown scenarios into first-person experiential scenes, realizing a leap from the “Cognitive Era” to the “Experiential Era.” “Humans are increasingly positioned at the core of communication practices, enhancing their status as mediators and connectors with society.” In this all-sensory experiential era, humans are the core of perceiving what technology “makes possible,” the boundaries of action are further expanded, and human value and capabilities begin to be unprecedentedly released. Based on human perception, thinking, and behavior, information can exert substantial influence through machines. The practical field of humans expands from real space to virtual space, and the radius of human practice is infinitely enlarged, granting unprecedented freedom to human actions.
(2) New Structures: Human-Machine Symbiosis Creates New Social Practice Fields
In traditional human-media relationships, technology is often seen as separate from humans and the construction of life scenarios. Although technology has played an important role in social progress, it has always existed in a “lone wolf” manner, failing to fully realize the synergistic effect of a common denominator. If we view the human-machine relationship and its interaction with surrounding environments as the core understanding from the perspective of affordance, then the so-called “new” media is not simply a matter of connecting existing technologies and content; rather, it is about integrating and restructuring technological and media elements according to the underlying logic of “relational connection and collaboration.” In the AGI era, media systems realize the emergent transformation of internal elements through collaborative actions. For individuals, their personalized needs are interpreted, more distinctive content is further produced, and their attributes and capabilities are enhanced; for media, the deep evolution of ChatGPT enhances its intelligence, enabling it to be applied across different fields through task automation or human-machine collaboration, thus improving service quality and efficiency across industries. The communication revolution brought about by the “new” media continuously drives the reshaping, iteration, and improvement of social forms and structures by adjusting the relationships between humans, media, and society.
Humanity has begun to transcend the “mechanical replication era” and is reaching the “artificial intelligence replication era.” The development of artificial intelligence technology exhibits the “three-dimensional spatial characteristics” of nature, spirit, and society. The participation of generative AI is causing a qualitative change in the fusion and collaboration of these three spaces with the real world, generating new communicative subjects through the collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence. Generative AI will experience three stages in this “spatial revolution”: first, the assistant stage, where generative AI assists humans in content production; second, the collaborative stage, where generative AI appears in a virtual-real coexisting form, creating a situation of mutual shaping between humans and machines; and third, the original stage, where generative AI independently completes content creation. In this process, intelligent technology further embeds itself in the social relationship network, forming emergent communicative energy under the impetus of aggregation effects.
(3) Deep Mediation: A Super-Real Media World After Complete “Permeation”
In the deeply mediated era, the social role of media begins to sink as the “operating system” of society, not only as traditional content producers and disseminators but also as indispensable basic service providers, social relationship connectors, social value integrators, and social innovation promoters. With the advent of new technologies in the AGI era, a more free, flexible, experiential, and effective super-real media world is beginning to emerge. The essence of the transition from “mediation” to “deep mediation” is that today’s society is completely “permeated” by media, meaning that media has become a fundamental element of the entire social structure, and communication itself has become the network of social structural relationships.
In this new social field, promoting social change through the multidimensional connections of human-machine relationships, and activating the social communication mechanism through efficient interactions between humans and machines, enables efficient, activated, and integrated connections among content, people, objects, and information, forming a more efficient resource allocation, more accessible scientific and technological advances, and a more complete functional platform in an integrated social ecology. Media systems possess strong “self-organizing” characteristics; the system’s “symbolic parameters” through random fluctuations construct the complex mechanisms of external media situations. The development of new technologies has introduced stimulating elements, promoting the game between balanced and unbalanced states within media systems, facilitating the stepwise rise of complex media systems during dynamic development. The re-empowerment of generative AI for individuals and content supports the complex adaptive evolution of the communication ecology, further injecting powerful internal driving forces into the evolution of the communication ecology. At this stage, the entire society will reshape its business and structure through new communication mechanisms, laws, and models in the context of “deep mediation”.
Possible Paths for Human-Machine Relationships in the Deeply Mediated Era
The emergence of relationships is a prerequisite for all human-machine interactions, and the theory of affordance emphasizes focusing on the relationships between humans and technology, as well as the relationship between human perception and the action possibilities provided by the environment. Viewing human-machine relationships in the AGI era from the perspective of affordance, exploring how humans perceive machines in the gradually “permeating” media process, how the mediated environment influences human use of machines, and the isomorphism and symbiosis of human-machine relationships will be core issues and possible paths for future research on human-machine communication.
(1) How to See: Humans’ Metacognition of Machines’ Affordances Determines Their Survival in the Deeply Mediated Environment
How individuals perceive their living environment largely determines how they survive within it, which is also Gibson’s fundamental argument against the “stimulus-response” theory. In the mediated environment, affordance delineates the boundaries of human behavioral possibilities, but because each person’s action purposes and specific needs differ, their perceptions of machines’ affordances also vary. As media users, humans do not recognize the relationship of affordance with machines from a single dimension; rather, their understanding is complex, multi-dimensional, and fluid, and the rich diversity of individual cognition often leads to subtle differences in individual behaviors. Thus, in a sense, human perception of machines’ affordance becomes the “metacognition” that influences all subsequent behavioral activities.
In the AGI era, “the communicative utility between humans and machines is homogeneous; the interactions between biological life, digital life, and machine life are inevitable.” The deepening of the human-machine relationship is not a confrontational or direct domestication; rather, it is often a mutual shaping and symbiotic effect. In the information ecological chain, technology, humans, and content become important nodes. Even in the deeply intelligent era, the human brain remains the template for machine learning. The intelligence of machines primarily derives from human knowledge production and life practices; AIGC cannot be divorced from the human corpus and behavioral frameworks. At the same time, to some extent, machines also reflect humans; humans need to make rational judgments about the content provided by machines. Taking ChatGPT as an example, the machine processes knowledge and information as its object, which inherently contains systemic biases and accidental errors, including a lot of mixed or even erroneous information. Therefore, in facing the answers provided by machines, humans need to possess stronger and more rational judgment capabilities.
AI is indeed more convenient and faster, but whether machine responses will create new knowledge boundaries and hierarchies, whether the new simulated environment it brings expands or limits human cognitive horizons, and how this mutual scaling of human-machine simulated environments compares to the real environment—whether it expands or narrows the gap—are all urgent issues to clarify and confront in the “how to see” problem. Similarly, it is essential to acknowledge the potential social risks and challenges brought about by the widespread application of intelligent technology, which conversely requires humans to accurately grasp the direction of intelligent technology development, establishing rules for the application fields, deep structures, and effective operation of intelligent technologies, while affordance serves as the fundamental element driving related behaviors and changes.
(2) How to Use: The Ecological Impact of Environmental and Contextual Factors and the New Infrastructure of Deep Mediation on Human-Machine Relationships
Humans are not isolated individuals outside the environment; this is a point Gibson has consistently emphasized. Similarly, affordance does not refer solely to environmental attributes; it also pertains to attributes related to subject behavior. It is not merely about human “perception-action” but rather about the “perception-action” that aligns with environmental attributes. Thus, humans are the meta-scale of media development; before acting, they consider the coupling of their behavior with the environment and their position within that environment, which addresses the “how to use” question.
Every advance in media development is accompanied by increased human freedom and further expansion of social connections. Humans are tribal animals, and as the boundaries between virtual societies and the real world gradually dissolve, they are no longer mere isolated individuals but possess greater significance in social connections. In the AGI era, new technologies produce social content and communication dialogues with a semantic expression and resource mobilization capacity above a social average line, flattening the information hierarchy of the internet. The relationship between individual media use and social time-space begins to form an “embedding-layering-synchronizing” relationship, where individuals adjust their use of technology to control their connections with the outside world. This research approach, which incorporates environmental factors into the consideration of human-machine relationships, aligns with Gibson’s emphasis on the concept of affordance: human perception and action align with the environment, determining how people observe and act.
At the same time, individuals need to acknowledge the emotional value that machines bring to human life. Emotion is a crucial factor in achieving consensus between humans and machines. What humans need is not merely the “function” of a product but, more importantly, the “experience” of use. Establishing a mutually beneficial human-machine relationship is key to achieving critical breakthroughs in the humanoid thinking of artificial intelligence, allowing the basic values, emotional mechanisms, and behaviors of artificial intelligence to integrate with humans; it also requires the acceleration of human evolution, achieving self-improvement in the new infrastructure and scenarios of the deeply mediated era, thus realizing synchronization between humans and machines.
(3) How to Think: Expounding the Isomorphic Value of Human-Machine Relationships in the AGI Era from the Perspectives of Organism Philosophy and Symbiosis
The foundation of “human-machine” symbiosis lies in the recognition that the future society will be an intelligent society co-created by humans and machines, ultimately achieving human-machine symbiosis through collaboration, integration, and blending. The complex and variable relationships between humans and machines are catalyzed by advancements in AI technology, giving rise to “new qualities” that strongly react back on the media information ecology, further fostering the transformation and proliferation of elements within the information ecosystem and generating emergent mechanisms. In the process of emergence, the interactions between various types of “organisms” become more complex, and the human-machine relationship becomes more multidimensional. From the historical perspective of media technology transitions, as media continuously sinks as the operating system of society, the development of the human-machine relationship also exhibits progressive three-structural characteristics: “mutual dependence – mutual penetration – mutual embedding,” reflecting the intricate relationships between different organisms, such as “biological organisms,” “social organisms,” “spiritual organisms,” and “artificial organisms.”
The essence of “human-machine” interaction, from the perspective of organism philosophy, lies in the continuous endowing of organism characteristics from life forms, social entities, and spiritual entities into machines during everyday practices, forming artificial organisms and thereby achieving “transference.” The transition from the “weak artificial intelligence era” to the “strong artificial intelligence era” will also experience three stages of transference: first, functional transference, where humans endow machines with bodily, sensory, and cognitive functions while machines undergo upgrades from partial to holistic, from flat to three-dimensional, and from low-dimensional to high-dimensional; second, volitional transference, where machines as artificial organisms need to reflect human needs and intentions, learning from and imitating humans during design and use phases, thereby enhancing the efficiency of human-machine relationships; and finally, the transference of responsibility and trust, where humans continuously endow machines with their trust during technological practices, while also attributing their own responsibilities to machines, allowing machines to assume certain moral and ethical responsibilities at different levels and degrees. At the same time, these three transference processes also represent the reciprocal influence of artificial organisms on biological, social, and spiritual organisms. With the assistance of intelligent machines, humans can more easily overcome the barriers of “capacity gaps,” effectively activating and mobilizing vast external resources, forming rich social expressions and value creation capabilities; the enhancement of humanoid functions in machines provides possibilities for “machines assisting humans” or even “machines replacing humans.” It is evident that the interactions between organisms gradually form a mechanism of mutual promotion, mutual shaping, and mutual constraints. The human-machine relationship is essentially the interaction and influence between “biological organisms,” “social organisms,” “spiritual organisms,” and the “artificial organism” of machines, where the four types of organisms continuously seek a stable, suitable, and appropriate relationship during their coordination and development, which is also the harmonious, unified, and symbiotic relationship between humans and machines.
As the deeply mediated society further progresses and evolves, media technologies and mediated structures constitute a new environment for human existence. Intelligent media shape humans’ perceptions of self, reality, and the world; the research paradigm of human-machine communication may no longer involve the binary issue of subject-object but rather refer to relationships and contexts, representing a highly interactive coupling between different communication subjects. In the AGI era, humans and machines serve as mutual scales, and the human-machine relationship transforms from a binary separation of subjects to a “composite common subject,” where the environmental and ecological-level media structures may exert more subtle influences on individuals. This means that people may only subconsciously feel that they are entering a “place” or “space” filled with various meanings and purposes, surviving in a state of human-machine symbiosis out of some inertia.
From Gibson’s perspective, humans, machines, and the media environment collectively constitute a holistic ecological circle that requires a dynamic approach to explore the balance point of human-machine relationships. “The omnipresence of machines and our communication with them has not made us machines; rather, it has made us more human.” The emergence of generative artificial intelligence technology indicates that human and technological development is at a complex intersection. Just as OpenAI’s goal has shifted from initially “shaping future technologies” to “creating safe, beneficial technologies for all humanity,” it is evident that technological development must consider ethical meanings of “safety” and value positioning of “benefiting all humanity.” How humans maintain subjectivity and how the relationship between machines and individuals evolves are indeed worthy of in-depth exploration from the perspective of affordance. The rapid development of intelligent technology continues to change the fluid, mutual shaping, and symbiotic human-machine relationship, and from the perspective of affordance in the ecological field, we can explore the agency of humans in their interactions with machines and the fluidity of constructing human-machine relationships, further contemplating the transformation of human-machine relationships from “function” to “possibility” in the AGI era, and understanding the new paradigm of human-machine communication in the context of the current deeply mediated environment.
Yang Ya, Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, Beijing Normal University, Doctoral Supervisor
Teng Wenqiang, Doctoral Student, School of Journalism and Communication, Beijing Normal University
Yang Jiayi (Corresponding Author), Lecturer, School of Chinese Language and Literature, University of International Business and Economics
Source: WeChat Official Account of the Journal of Social Governance, for the complete version see the Journal of Social Governance, Issue 4, 2023
