This article discusses the role of technological myths in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies from 1950s to the early 1970s. It shows how the rise of AI was accompanied by the construction of a powerful cultural myth: the creation of a thinking machine, which would be able to perfectly simulate the cognitive faculties of the human mind. Based on a content analysis of articles on Artificial Intelligence published in two magazines, the Scientific American and the New Scientist, which were aimed at a broad readership of scientists, engineers, and technologists, three dominant patterns in the construction of the AI myth are identified: (1) the recurrence of analogies and discursive shifts, by which ideas and concepts from other fields were employed to describe the functioning of AI technologies; (2) a rhetorical use of the future, imagining that present shortcomings and limitations will shortly be overcome; (3) the relevance of controversies around the claims of AI, which we argue should be considered as an integral part of the discourse surrounding the AI myth.

Despite its ubiquity in scholarly and popular publications, relatively few attempts have been made to interrogate the meanings and implications of the notion of “old media.” This article discusses this notion in the context of theoretical debates within media and communication studies. Defining old media as artifacts, technologies, or in terms of their social use is problematic, because media constantly change, resisting clear‐cut definitions related to age. The article therefore proposes to treat new media as a relational concept: not an attribute characterizing media as such, but an element of how people perceive and imagine them. Rhetoric, everyday experience, and emotions are key contexts where new ground can be found to redefine the concept of “old media.”

itself with the Web. The traditional political establishment is associated with "old" media (television, radio, and the printed press), and represented as a "walking dead," doomed to be superseded and buried by a Web-based direct democracy.

150)Disconnection has recently come to the forefront of public discussions as an antidote to an increasing saturation with digital technologies. Yet experiences with disconnection are often reduced to a form of disengagement that diminishes their political impact. Disconnective practices focused on health and well-being are easily appropriated by big tech corporations, defusing their transformative potential into the very dynamics of digital capitalism. In contrast, a long tradition of critical thought, from Joseph Weizenbaum to Jaron Lanier passing through hacktivism, demonstrates that engagement with digital technologies is instrumental to develop critique and resistance against the paradoxes of digital societies. Drawing from this tradition, this article proposes the concept of "Disconnection-through-Engagement" to illuminate situated practices that mobilize disconnection in order to improve critical engagement with digital technologies and platforms. Hybridity, anonymity, and hacking are examined as three forms of Disconnection-through-Engagement, and a call to decommodify disconnection and recast it as a source of collective critique to digital capitalism is put forward.

The article proposes the notion of "biographies of media" to address the complex ways through which media change is the subject of narration and storytelling. This concept provides theoretical tools to unveil how different narratives contribute to shape media's identities and to carry particular representations of their roles in our society and everyday life. Relying on theoretical approaches to storytelling and to the biographical genre, as well as on a range of examples from media history, the article shows that narratives are not only key elements in the content of media texts, but also ways through which the impact of media on society and everyday life is represented and negotiated within the public sphere.