The full book

Essays

Twenty essays from Framing Tomorrow. Each one: a real problem, a classical theory that explains it, and a protocol you can put to work this week.

I

The Machines of Meaning

Five essays on the systems that organise meaning before we notice the organising: McLuhan, Stuart Hall, Craig, framing theory and the machine-written self.

II

The Architecture of Attention

Five essays on the journey from information surplus to public salience: digital plastic, answer engines, agenda-setting, artificial crowds and sycophantic AI.

III

Evidence in a Synthetic World

Five essays rebuilding trust as a chain of accountable relationships: the vanishing footnote, image provenance, authenticity, the reporter's pocket and the off-the-record prompt.

IV

Responsibility Has a Human Face

Five closing essays on who pays the hidden cost: invisible labour, language inequality, exclusion by design, synthetic violence and human oversight that actually holds power.

20 essays

01 Part I

AI Is Not a Hammer. It Is a Room That Rearranges Our Thinking: McLuhan After ChatGPT

How can we use generative AI without quietly outsourcing the very competence needed to spot its mistakes?

12 min read

02 Part I

When the Text Answers Everyone Differently: Stuart Hall in the Age of Chatbots

How can meaning survive when summarisation, translation and personalisation produce invisible variants of the same publication?

11 min read

03 Part I

Seven Theories, One Dispute: Craig’s Map for Teams Implementing AI

Why can people use the same words about ‘responsible AI’ while trying to solve seven different problems?

11 min read

04 Part I

‘AI Has Just Changed Everything’ – for the Seventeenth Time: Hype as a Journalistic Genre

A revolutionary product, a flawless demo, a chief executive’s quotation and a future beginning on Thursday. Hype is more than excessive enthusiasm. It is a repeatable story form that moves money,…

12 min read

05 Part I

The ‘I’ Written by a Machine: When AI Becomes the Ghostwriter of Our Identity

How can we delegate the editing of language without giving a system the right to define our public self?

11 min read

06 Part II

Digital Plastic: Who Cleans Up After the Mass Production of AI Content?

Can a piece of content be accurate and useful yet still cause harm — not by itself, but as part of a production model that sends its bill to the whole information environment?

11 min read

07 Part II

Who Sets the Agenda When the Answer Has No Front Page? The Invisible Gates of Answer Engines

How do we hold selection to account when the user receives one finished answer instead of a visible field of sources?

12 min read

08 Part II

Everyone Sees Something Important, Just Not the Same Thing: Agenda-Setting After the End of the Shared Front Page

How can a public conversation survive when personalisation separates not only opinions, but the list of matters considered important?

11 min read

09 Part II

The Artificial Crowd: How Bots Falsify the Social Temperature

How can journalists avoid confusing the number of posts with the number of people, virality with a majority, and a noisy cluster with public opinion?

12 min read

10 Part II

You’re Right, Even When You’re Wrong: How Sycophantic AI Takes Away Our Right to Change Our Minds

What happens to judgement when the world’s most patient interlocutor is excellent at improving our mood but less reliable at spoiling a bad idea?

11 min read

11 Part III

‘Check the Source’ – But Where Is It? Media Literacy After the End of the Footnote

AI can answer before we have finished formulating our doubt. The trouble begins when its footnote leads to a home page, a dead link or a document that does not support the sentence. How do we move…

11 min read

12 Part III

Evidence Must Travel with the Image: A MoJo Protocol After the End of Faith in Pixels

How can a newsroom defend genuine mobile footage when it preserved the final export but lost the story of how that export came to exist?

11 min read

13 Part III

Authentic, but Not Necessarily Credible: What Is Missing Between a Face and Evidence

When a creator shows us the kitchen, the exhaustion and the dog asleep beneath the desk, closeness can feel like proof. How do we keep the human face of news without allowing it to replace sources?

12 min read

14 Part III

Your Phone Is a Camera, an Editing Suite – and an Informant: The Hidden Cost of MoJo

A smartphone lets a reporter get closer and publish faster. It can also tell strangers where that reporter went, whom they met and how they work. How can mobile journalism avoid making sources pay…

12 min read

15 Part III

The Prompt That Betrays an Informant: When a Chatbot Becomes the Third Participant in an Off-the-Record Conversation

A transcript can contain no name and still identify its speaker. Role, date, a small institution, a rare event and a turn of phrase may be enough. Before asking AI to summarise a confidential…

11 min read

16 Part IV

Under the Automation Carpet: The Invisible People Who Make AI Work

How can organisations buy and deploy AI without benefiting from a low price made possible by erasing other people’s labour?

10 min read

17 Part IV

The Economy-Class Model: What Happens When AI Listens to Your Language Less Well?

How can we test whether users of different languages really receive the same service, safety and respect?

11 min read

18 Part IV

AI as Both Ramp and Staircase: When ‘Easy Technology’ Excludes Those Who Need It Most

How can we design AI content and services around a person’s real independence rather than an impressive demonstration?

11 min read

19 Part IV

A Deepfake Is Not ‘Just a Fake Picture’: Synthetic Violence as a Tool for Silencing Women in the Media

When a sexualised deepfake targets a journalist, the central question is not whether viewers will mistake it for a genuine image. The attack can work even when everybody knows it is false: it…

11 min read

20 Part IV

‘Human in the Loop’ Does Not Mean a Person Beside a Green Button

‘Checked by a human’ sounds like a quality guarantee. But did that person have the time, expertise, context and authority to say no? Human oversight becomes real only when the human has power —…

13 min read