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<p>This theoretical essay proposes an integrative framework for analyzing machine speech, the autonomous generation of linguistically interpretable content by computational systems that acquires institutional legitimation and carries decision-bearing weight in social, organizational, and communicational contexts. The framework is built around three foundational traditions: Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, and Marvin Minsky’s society of mind. Rather than treating these traditions sequentially, the essay reads them together across three constitutive dimensions of the problem while mobilizing Latour’s actor-network theory as the relational ontology that connects agency, materiality, and accountability across all three dimensions. From this integrated reading, the essay derives and operationalizes a diagnostic triad of modalities through which machine speech operates, complementarity, substitution and coconstruction. The triad is advanced not as a taxonomy of AI systems but as an analytical instrument for identifying how communicational agency, visibility, and accountability are configured differently across these three modes. Each modality implies a distinct accountability regime. The essay argues that theorizing machine communication requires moving beyond transmission models toward a relational understanding of agency as a sociotechnical achievement distributed across humans, algorithms, data, and infrastructures.</p>

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Between humans and algorithms: framing machine communication as a socio-technical relation

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

    开放获取

  • 发表日期：

    2026年4月18日

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  • Vander Muniz,
  • Ébida Santos

摘要

This theoretical essay proposes an integrative framework for analyzing machine speech, the autonomous generation of linguistically interpretable content by computational systems that acquires institutional legitimation and carries decision-bearing weight in social, organizational, and communicational contexts. The framework is built around three foundational traditions: Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, and Marvin Minsky’s society of mind. Rather than treating these traditions sequentially, the essay reads them together across three constitutive dimensions of the problem while mobilizing Latour’s actor-network theory as the relational ontology that connects agency, materiality, and accountability across all three dimensions. From this integrated reading, the essay derives and operationalizes a diagnostic triad of modalities through which machine speech operates, complementarity, substitution and coconstruction. The triad is advanced not as a taxonomy of AI systems but as an analytical instrument for identifying how communicational agency, visibility, and accountability are configured differently across these three modes. Each modality implies a distinct accountability regime. The essay argues that theorizing machine communication requires moving beyond transmission models toward a relational understanding of agency as a sociotechnical achievement distributed across humans, algorithms, data, and infrastructures.