Abstract
Professor David J. Gunkel is the Chair of the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University – but that is his latest achievement in an extensive list of accomplishments. He is an award-winning educator, researcher, and the author of more than ninety scholarly articles and thirteen books. And it is his latest book, AI for Communication, and his latest thinking about what we have called artificial intelligence and writing that brought him to our 82nd annual conference.
In his keynote address on Saturday, October 9th, 2024, Dr. Gunkel argues that AI does not signal the “end of writing” as much as it suggests the twilight of a conception of writing that has been traditionally theorized as “logocentrism,” (a concept introduced by Jacques Derrida) that suggests that we in the West prioritize speech over writing, and that privilege is now questioned by “large language models” and generative AI. So, for Professor Gunkel, writing has a future but to enter that future, we have to, in his words, reconceptualize how we think about writing and write about thinking.”
Dr. Gunkel’s work and scholarship can be found at dgunkel@niu.edu and gunkelweb.com.
Presentation Slides
Recommended Citation
Gunkel, David J.
(2025)
"Does Writing Have a Future?,"
Proceedings of the New York State Communication Association: Vol. 2024, Article 8.
Available at:
https://docs.rwu.edu/nyscaproceedings/vol2024/iss1/8