Cultural Practice

Let's just call the average users 'Realos'. This clearly shows that so-called early adopters are not necessarily representative of the general population.

We often get excited about innovations that later turn out to be failures—think of Second Life, Segway, or Google Glass. It may be that they were ahead of their time. Second Life is now supposed to be called the Metaverse. Segways are the e-scooters lying around, and as for glasses with special features, perhaps the final word has not yet been spoken.

The early adoption of technology by Realos increases with the degree of a culture of digitality.

A revealing example from my lecture on digitalization before Realos 15 years ago: It took the radio 9 years to reach 50 million users. The iPod achieved the same number of users in just 9 months—a memorable acceleration.

Felix Stalder writes in Culture of Digitality, how digital technologies were able to spread in areas 'where there was already a demand for them' and that their use is 'intertwined with certain cultural practices', for example in contexts of empowerment, fluid identities, and post-bureaucratic creative economies.

He emphasizes that new technologies were able to move 'from the edge to the center' because society had previously 'structurally changed', such as through the knowledge economy or the erosion of traditional institutions.

He literally writes:

It was thus a combination of positive vision and pressure that motivated a wide range of actors to change their previous behavior, established processes, and grown institutions, often with considerable effort.

This strongly suggests that in a culture of digitality there is already an openness, indeed a cultural framework, for early technology reception—especially among actors who are socialized with or familiar with these cultural forms.

Although the smartphone does not meet a fundamental communication need, it enables numerous activities that would otherwise require considerable effort.

This change in our everyday practice is not entirely negative or positive. Therefore, I introduce the term shortcut technologies: They promise to achieve desired outcomes faster and more easily than conventional methods. We must pay attention to our institutions.

Language is always culturally formative

Is it already immoral not to own a smartphone? What if we no longer accept texts in the future that have not been falsified by an LLM?

The movement from the edge to the center described by Stalder gains particular significance in the context of language models. Since language is not only a tool but the fundamental medium of human existence and cultural formation, the rapid adoption of language models by broad population segments seems almost inevitable. Unlike many other digital innovations that were initially niche applications, AI-powered language processing strikes directly at the heart of everyday practices—from simple conversations to complex text production. This central positioning makes language models particularly attractive to Realos, as they tap into existing communication needs and habits.

If so-called large language models (LLMs) are now mixing in, it is not surprising that every Realo can write a prompt. The stoic nature of the stochastic parrot ensures that it listens to every word. It almost feels as if we have trained it to meet our needs in the shortest time. It all depends on the words we entrust to it, and therefore it would be fatal if the nerds of language withdraw and the language models are no longer fed.