In recent years, the market has witnessed the growing spread of a new class of hybrid technological devices, which share the characteristic of combining the communicative functions typical of media (providing access to content, connecting users) with the operational functions typical of “machines.” By using the term “machines,” in this context, we refer to technological tools whose primary function is to exercise material agency in the world – that is, to perform operations on the material level, such as a vacuum cleaner, a home appliance, or a measuring instrument.

For example, this is the case of smart speakers like Google Home or Alexa: these devices can be used to listen to music and podcasts, to interact vocally with other users, and to search for information using voice commands. At the same time, they allow us to turn lights on or off, adjust the home temperature, and control other media-ready devices like smart TVs and other home automation functions. Through smart speakers, it is also possible to program complex and integrated sequences of both media and non-media activities that are automatically executed when certain conditions are met. When we wake up, devices may play our favorite music, turn on the water heater, start the coffee machine – ordering capsules online if they’re running low–and then read our emails or the daily news while we are having breakfast.

Other examples of media-machines that are increasingly spreading include smart toys (Mascheroni & Holloway 2019) – network-connected intelligent toys capable of interacting with children also through natural language – or social robots (Tosoni, Mascheroni & Colombo 2022), humanoid or not: robots whose primary function is not to perform a specific task but to interact communicatively with users, providing them with information, assisting them when needed, or simply keeping them company. Research is currently exploring possible applications of this technology: beyond marketing and entertainment, one of the most promising fields of use appears to be assistance for the elderly or hospitalized individuals, or the treatment of specific conditions such as certain forms of autism.

Radicalization of Convergence

The diffusion of media-machines in their most sophisticated form is still in its early stages, although well underway. To understand their potential, and the ethical issues they raise, it is therefore essential to assess their novelty in the context of broader technological and media transformations that have characterized, and characterize, media and technological scenario, identifying developmental trajectories and lines of continuity.

From this perspective, media-machines appear primarily as a radicalization of the media convergence process driven by digitalization. This process is well known and studied by scholars that analyze transformations in the media system. Convergence and the accompanying scientific reflection began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the various analog signals typical of the old mass media system (radio and television waves, but also vinyl grooves, or electromagnetic tape recordings) started to be supplemented – and then replaced – by a common digital signal. While different analog signals required specialized devices for their decoding and fruition, the digital signal is processed by a single technological tool, the microprocessor, even though it is embedded in a wide variety of media devices (computers, cell phones, tablets, e-readers, etc.): in this sense, today the microprocessor is mediating all other media, and thus places itself at the core of today’s media system as a meta-medium.

Digital convergence has led, under economic, aesthetic, and cultural pressures, to a gradual reconfiguration of the media system: media have increasingly hybridized, blurred their boundaries, and exchanged functions and content. A clear example is the smartphone, which integrates and blends functions once belonging to telephony, television, books, photography, gaming consoles, music players, and telematics – softening any rigid distinction. The rise of media-machines can thus be read as a radicalization of this process: it is no longer only media that exchange functions and hybridize, but machines are now part of the convergence process.

This phenomenon is facilitated by two prior and parallel processes that have prepared the current shift by bringing media and machines closer together. On one hand, we have seen the “botization” of media: media now increasingly function like bots, that is, like algorithmic automated systems. In a process of real algorithmic intermediation (Colombo, Murru & Tosoni 2018), for instance, search engines, social media, or online content platforms select content for us based on algorithmic analysis of our preferences and observed online behaviors, which are collected and processed as data–this is the so-called “datafication” process. On the other hand, machines have become increasingly “mediatized”: for instance, equipped with increasingly sophisticated, even voice-based, programmable interfaces; communicating more and more systematically with users (and other machines) about their status, task progress, or possible malfunctions; and above all, connecting with one another through the same infrastructure used by botified media–namely, the Internet: the so-called Internet of Things.

Ethical issues and doctrinal references

If media-machines emerge from the convergence of the two processes just described, it is to those processes that we must look in order to predict not only their potential but also their possible criticalities, in line with the framework laid out by social teaching of the Church, starting from the 1963 Decree on the media of social communications Inter Mirifica (see Social Communications and Magisterium: The Resonating Words). Here, two key issues are highlighted.

First, as media, media-machines replicate the functioning based on user profiling, behavioral data collection, and algorithmic processing, already well researched in digital media studies. In this way, social media and search engines propose content similar to what has previously captured our attention (as shown by actions such as clicking a link, adding a comment, or reacting to content), or that of users like us. Among these contents are, of course, highly targeted advertisements – resulting in a commercial exploitation of attention. Awareness of the relevance of the network effects resulting from this operating principle on communication as an opportunity for human development emerges in various documents on digital communication. For example, the Message for the 45th World Communications Day (2011), which reminds us: “We must be aware that the truth which we long to share does not derive its worth from its ‘popularity’ or from the amount of attention it receives”. The Message for the 48th World Communications Day (2014) warns that social media also enable “people to barricade themselves behind sources of information which only confirm their own wishes and ideas, or political and economic interests”. In the Message for the 53rd World Communications Day (2019), Pope Francis also directly refers to “the manipulation of personal data, aimed at obtaining political or economic advantages, without due respect for the person and his or her rights”.

Media-Machines as media

However, media-machines extend this mode of operation beyond the screen. It is no longer just our online behavior that is translated into data, analyzed, and used for targeting strategies, but potentially all the practices and routines of our daily lives – or at least those carried out with the support of media-machines. A robot vacuum, for instance, generates a detailed map of our home; a smart thermostat records our energy usage; a smart speaker can log all activities it is used for. This is not merely a further extension of datafication and algorithmic intermediation, which enhances our identifiability as targets for products and services. It also represents an escalation to a more complex level: media-machines not only mediate content, like media do, but also transform the practices and routines they support, in ways that require critical scrutiny.

Consider, for example, the use of smartphone as an interface for urban life – used for navigating to places or events in a city. Here, the logic of algorithmic intermediation presents us with suggestions based on our past experiences, thus connecting us with similar people and situations. As noted in the 2019 Post-synodal apostolic exhortation Christus vivit, “the way many platforms work often ends up favouring encounter between persons who think alike, shielding them from debate” (89). This tendency toward homophily – the preference for the similar–directly impacts the experience of the city as a social space, historically a place of encounter with the different and the stranger, thereby deepening social fragmentation. Research increasingly shows that algorithms themselves are far from neutral in how they function and in their effects on users. Instead, they reflect the cultural biases (ethnic, gender-based, social, etc.) and assumptions of those who programmed and calibrated them. A study published by Science, for example, revealed that the algorithm used by the U.S. healthcare system contained systematic–though unintentional–biases that assigned a higher risk class to black individuals than to the rest of the population, with major consequences for access to care (Obermeyer, Powers, Vogeli, & Mullainathan 2019). While Catholic social teaching stresses “the requisite that new technologies respect legitimate cultural differences” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 2004, 415), the expansion of algorithmic intelligence through media-machines risks deepening the impact of these biases on users’ lives.

Media-Machines as machines

The second ethical challenge posed by media-machines derives from their nature as programmable machines, particularly endowed with algorithmic or artificial intelligence. Regarding automation and robotization, the 2015 encyclical Laudato si’ warned against delegating tasks previously carried out by humans to machines, resulting in unemployment, job displacement and related social exclusion. In the case of media-machines, however, we again encounter an escalation to a more complex level: in fact, they increasingly present themselves as true communicative partners to humans, inviting interactions that aim to be as “natural” as possible – often through voice-based interfaces.

As seen with smart toys, smart speakers, or humanoid social robotics in caregiving contexts, the delegation to machines now risks involving no longer repetitive work operations, but essential aspects of human relationships: care, attention, listening, and recognition. This is not to deny the enormous potential these technologies offer, but rather to highlight the inevitable risks that arise when implementation strategies lose sight of the guiding value of integral human development.

From a regulatory perspective, these aspects of media-machines are currently governed in Europe mainly by legislation on data collection and processing, including the recent Data Act, which aims to introduce rules which ensure fairness in the use of data generated by the Internet of Things (IoT). It remains to be seen how the media nature of these hybrid devices will bring them under the scope of the Digital Services Act, which specifically regulates online platforms.