Today, we live in a world where various technological imaginations have been envisioned. AI has been gradually occupying human daily lives as a tool by collecting information, advising on writing, and providing idiomatic translations, etc. Notably, as humans naturally adapt to technology, concerns about overreliance on AI have escalated drastically in recent years.

As Socrates claimed two thousand years ago, writing destroys memory and weakens the mind (Ong, 2002). Debates over the change brought by new technology are a common pattern throughout history. From Socrates’ condemnation of writing, to the advent of mass reproduction of books, to the appearance of the World Wide Web, each arrival of new technology has been accompanied by copious doubts. Each development brings massive changes to human lives, and gradually, people become accustomed to novelty.

Correspondingly, just as we are acclimated to writing and browsing the internet, it is demanding for people to be aware of the existence of the medium. And by medium, I mean the often-invisible presence in everything that surrounds us in life: our smartphones, social media, and all kinds of content we might immerse ourselves in. In other words, people have the tendency to ignore the idea that the medium is the message.

From the book The Medium is the Massage by McLuhan and Fiore, we know that every use of a medium delivers a message, and every decision about media deprives certain kinds of possibilities and enables specific intentions behind the medium. It is challenging to step out of our comfort zone to reflect on meaning, since we have adapted to almost everything we have today, alongside the new habit of AI.

The discussion of AI not only enables us to reflect on the technology itself but also offers the opportunity to ponder the use of the medium in all kinds of content creation, like art-making, writing, and even a social media post.

In the early years when the Internet was born, every content creator held the curiosity to explore the conceivable adaptation of this platform as the medium for their art or writing.

Earlier, in the late 1960s, when cameras like the Portapak became more affordable and easy-to-use recording devices, artists experimented with new possibilities in their art. Considering the camera itself as the medium and audience, Bruce Nauman recorded Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square in 1968, making body movements in one’s studio become art.

The Internet broke the boundaries of where art takes place; galleries, salons, and museums are no longer the only institutions that archive art. People write blogs and share information on the network; the novelty of the internet gradually fades out in people’s consciousness as a medium. The unthinking use of the internet has deprived people of recognizing the meaning of using it. Using the internet, it means granting imperceptible access to all kinds of people.

The consequences of the decision to post all kinds of content on the net are highly underestimated by almost everyone. It is questionable whether people genuinely reflect on the reason that they are posting on a platform. It is true that posting artwork on Instagram, for example, helps with the spread of one’s art, but most artists do not reflect on the relationship between the art itself and the platform. Why should art be placed on social media like Instagram when it has nothing to do with the intention behind the work? The decision to post it on a specific platform delivers a message that relates to the nature of the medium. If an artwork was not initially designated to exist in digital space, what does it mean to put it on social media? Choosing a platform is itself a process of decision-making, and that choice carries intention—this is true for all kinds of content publishing.

The definition of “Post-Internet” by curator Marisa Olson, the writer Gene McHugh, and the artist Artie Vierkant in the mid 2000s not only describes how art is shaped by a world in which the internet is ambient infrastructure, influencing form and circulation beyond the screen, but also embodies the status quo of a missing awareness of medium. Today, posting anything online means enabling the content to be consumed easily and without reflection. It is acceptable if this is the intention of the person, but what I have observed is that people generally do not ponder how the use of a medium, media, or a platform could deliver a signal to consumers (whoever has accessibility).

To publish a story in the traditional way as a physical book, to hold an exhibition in a museum, to write blogs on one’s website, to decide on language as a multilingual writer, to use egg tempera or oil paint in painting—all uses of medium deliver a message to others. The post-internet condition has accelerated the degree to which people are becoming ignorant of the medium and its usage.

The unregulated use of AI allows unchecked data abuse, meaning one’s creation that is posted on the internet could become a free resource, used to train language models and to generate AI images. This is an unavoidable tendency today if we don’t start to think about the meaning of adapting a medium.

The existence of jobs like language training, which ask writers to devote their writing to training AI language models, exemplifies the problem. People can sell writing to feed AI for money, but how many content creators’ contributions have been used for free without authorization? This is the risk that people encounter when adapting to a medium.

In short, this manifesto asks all content creators and people to:

Think before you adapt a medium.
Think before you decide on a medium.
Think before you publish on a platform.

This is not only a reflection on the post-internet status quo but also an advocacy for all of us to ponder the consequences of making any decision that exposes our work to others.