Aesthetic Life in the Digital Age: How Emerging Technologies Affect Creativity, Consumption, and Community

What does aesthetic life look like in the digital age? This chapter explores the impact that AI, algorithms, social networking, and other technological innovations have had on the ways that we create, consume, and commune. We’ll divide our focus across each one of the three c’s listed above – creativity, consumption, and community. In each section, we’ll also be zooming in on one technological development, highlighting its specific impact on our aesthetic lives. The first section focuses on the emergence of AI-generated art and its impacts on creativity; the second section concerns the impact of algorithmic recommendation systems on our consumption; and in the final section, I discuss the ways in which the internet has affected our ability to form and maintain aesthetic communities.