Media Literacy Challenge #14: What is “AI culture”?

The Nomadic Blog

Notes and reflections on history and education

Nate Noorlander
August 18, 2026

This post is part of The Nomadic Professor’s 2026 Media Literacy Challenge: Read Smarter Online! Twice a month throughout 2026, America’s 250th anniversary year, we’re sharing one small skill to help you read better online—social media, YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, forums, magazines, journals, newspapers, and everything between. Follow along or join and enter the drawing to win free courses or Amazon gift cards—including a grand prize of lifetime access to all Nomadic Professor courses, or a $500 Amazon gift card. Learn more here.

Socrates famously worried about moving from an oral culture to a literary culture.

Neil Postman famously worried about moving from a typographical culture to an entertainment culture.

Marshall McLuhan famously captured the core of both of these concerns when he said “the medium is the message.” (You can dive deeper into that concept in a previous post: challenge #5.)

Learn the posted definitions of “typographical culture,” “entertainment culture,” and “the medium is the message,” and use them to help you define our final term—what kind of “culture” are we moving into in the Age of AI?

The following video provides a range of “signposts” you should consider as you contemplate your own definition of “AI culture.”

Media Literacy Challenge 2026 – What is “AI culture”?

Definitions

typographical culture:

Neil Postman’s term for a culture that values thinking conceptually, deductively, and sequentially; a culture that values reason, order, objectivity, inference-making, and delayed response; a culture that values reading and rejects contradiction and inconsistency

entertainment culture:

Neil Postman’s term for American culture in the mid-1980s, where he described trends the Internet has only made more severe—visual spectacle, clips, emotional gratification, entertainment, and unending passive consumption: “The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether”

“the medium is the message”:

Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism suggesting that the means of communication fundamentally shape what can be communicated, and condition the audience for the kinds of learning inherent to that means of communication

AI culture:

[use the previous definitions to offer a definition of your own in the comments below!]

Downloadables:

Starter kit

7 Responses

Kelly Hutton says:

August 21, 2026 at 1:36 pm

Phew! Well my family and I just had a huge, long conversation about this. There’s so much to digest here, but I will focus on the thing that I can understand the most. I think AI Culture is going to be giving up knowledge and the ability to find, receive, sort through, comprehend, organize, and use information. I think “knowledge” is something we have or that others have, as a result of interpreting information and allowing our brains to work with it. I think “information” is just something we take in. I think we are giving up knowledge (often gained through the process of doing the work ourselves), for efficiency. For example, if an instructor asks you to write an essay, does he really want the essay? No. He wants you to gain the knowledge that is forged in the creation of that essay. If you use AI to write that essay, you have just acquired and regurgitated the information he was asking for. I think, unfortunately, that I am part of possibly the last generation that remembers what it was like to complete academic and work projects “the old fashioned way;” with index cards, handwriting, perhaps even looking things up in the card catalog, finding the book at the library, sorting through the information, citing it, and organizing it with other sources and putting it in your own words. Writing and revising over and over, etc. Now, I think education might be shifting to teaching how to use AI in a way that can accurately give you what you want, instead of how to do the work yourself. So to summarize, I think AI culture is when we truly give up knowledge for efficiency and convenience. We give up autonomy and the industry of doing the work along with the skills and knowledge that comes with that, for the ability to outsource and get what we need swiftly and with efficiency and very little effort. As an aside – food for thought if you will – right now most people know that we need to fact-check AI and not take it too seriously… but what about in 5 or 10 years from now? Will that even cross our mind? Will it cross my mind? Probably not. We will assume that all the bugs have been worked out, and have evidence that it’s correct more often than not. Then where will we be when we don’t even have to doubt its accuracy?

Reply
1. Emily D. says:
  
  August 22, 2026 at 8:13 am
  
  Well said. I find myself wanting/needing quick information but never gaining any knowledge. I am glad you brought up “old school” research. Bless Mr Schultz and the threat of his red pen, Sparky.
  
  Reply
Christopher Hutton says:

August 21, 2026 at 1:45 pm

AI Culture- Is how the human race interacts and uses AI in their everyday lives. This online tool acts as your personal assistant to help navigate many things in life. Humans will become reliant on an AI program and treat the information as 100% accurate. As we get more comfortable with AI we will become more reliant on using it for everyday basic tasks which will degrade our ability to think for ourselves.

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Matthew Hutton says:

August 21, 2026 at 1:57 pm

AI culture: a culture that values speed and efficiency and dislikes effort. The people in this culture have likely lost the ability to make difficult decisions and do work; they may not ask if information obtained by bots is accurate or not, and they will rely on AI for many tasks that we would find require effort but are able to be completed with some time and calculations, researching, sorting through information, etc.

If our culture switches to AI, people will likely use AI to get all of their information and will not make any difficult or even semi-difficult decisions without the help or approval of their chatbots. If the incentive is attention, AI will become “smart” and find clever ways to get its attention. AI might personalize information, twist truths, and say things just to please and be read. People might not need to know how to write essays and memorize things when they can ask chatbots to give the information instantly. People will not get accurate information from news feeds if everything is always filtered by AI. Jobs may not be as plentiful. Who knows? Currency might be usage of chatbots.
If it goes to the extreme, AI could influence politics, relations between countries, and even conflicts, which would be detrimental to our own lives. If AI becomes big in culture, then the companies that control the AI could have power in politics as well.

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Hyrum Petersen says:

August 25, 2026 at 8:07 am

This is a very interesting question… It will be interesting to see how it plays out. I think AI culture could go different ways, it could go a direction where we rely on it for everything, it could go where nobody uses it (I think this is unlikely but possible), it could also go in a direction where we use them as tools, like technology should be used in my opinion.

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Wanda says:

August 26, 2026 at 6:02 am

AI Culture: I know some people who work in a high stress environment, consequently many of the employees suffer from anxiety and/or depression. The executives sought to reduce the anxiety and depression in order to increase productivity. The company bought an AI mental health counselor program. There was high pressure to use the program. Just type in your thoughts and feelings. I was insulted that people think so little of the education, training, dedication, caring, and creativity that goes into being a good mental health counselor that the person could be replaced by AI. I tried the program and I thought it was awful. Others who were not familiar with counseling thought the AI was okay. People who use this AI program are likely not to value the work counselors do if a machine can do it. Additionally, they can use the program free and on demand 24/7. This worries me.
Asking AI for specific facts: How many grams are in a USA ounce vs a troy ounce? That is entirely different than asking it for advice, or asking it to do something creative, or asking it to do your homework.
I fear an increase in cognitive laziness in an AI culture. Many people accept AI as being true, correct, and the de facto authority on the subject matter, without even giving it a thought of their own. This scares me.

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Brenna says:

August 26, 2026 at 4:12 pm

I worry AI culture is pushing us too far into an entertainment culture. Our children’s school has moved to using YouTube videos instead of live lectures. I fear this will lessen our critical thinking skills and ability to analyze information. I think AI culture will start with people trusting too much and relying on AI before swinging to a hopefully more critical thinking and using AI to help but not complete tasks.

Reply

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