One focus of my research has been the intersection of culture, technology and communication. What can research and theory tell us about culture and communication in digital spaces? What happens when people from different cultural backgrounds try to communicate using digital technologies? What challenges do they face? How do the special challenges of intercultural communication in digital environments affect teaching and learning? Which theories of culture or of communication can help us understand communication dynamics in digital spaces? How might digital environments (and especially digital learning environments), be better designed to facilitate human communications? How is global digital communication driving social, political and cultural change? Do digital communication technologies represent opportunities or threats to human cultures?
Most recently, I led a 2025 review project to discover what the most recent research tells us about whether digital communication technologies represent new opportunities, new threats, or both, for human cultures.
In particular, we proposed that 2023 marked a watershed for digital culture and internet research, catalyzed by the release of ChatGPT in November 2022 (OpenAI, 2022, November 30; Stokel-Walker, 2022, December 9). Building on Wellman’s (2011) notion of a Third Age of internet studies–when the internet became embedded, participatory, and plural – we coined the idea of a Fourth Age, in which model-mediated communication is becoming routine, and AI and algorithmic cultures are emerging and shaping our digital worlds and encultured lives. Generative models (text, image, audio, video) are increasingly co-authors, translators, stylizers, curators, and interlocutors in everyday interaction, reshaping ideas of authorship, creativity, and identity. Content is now not only curated by algorithms but increasingly produced by them (see Box 2). Continuing the discussion of ‘computer-mediated colonization’ (Ess, 2002), we must now also ask: Who creates knowledge? Who is represented in training data? Whose values shape AI-generated communication? Language dominance, cultural references, and communicative norms are increasingly shaped by training corpora and tech platform values.
Leah P. Macfadyen 