I have developed a habit recently: before every conversation with AI, I spend a few seconds thinking about how to write my prompt. Not just typing whatever comes to mind, but weighing word choices, adjusting tone, considering whether to add "please." No one taught me any of this. There is no user manual. But one day I realized I was already following a set of rules—I just could not say where they came from.
Gitelman calls this kind of thing a protocol. She argues that media are not just technologies but entire sets of social norms that grow up around them—saying "Hello?" when you pick up the phone, knowing what an email should look like, expecting a reply within a certain timeframe. These protocols are not written in any instruction manual, yet they shape your relationship with a medium more deeply than the hardware does. And when they mature enough, you stop seeing them altogether. Media become "transparent"—not because they truly are, but because you forget you are following norms at all.
What unsettles me is realizing that my relationship with AI works the same way: I thought I was "using" it, but I have already been shaped by an invisible set of protocols. The phrasing habits I follow when writing prompts, the expectation that AI should respond instantly, the mindset of treating its output as a "draft" I can accept or reject—these are not behaviors I rationally chose. They are more like default settings that settled in without my noticing. As Gitelman puts it, I forgot I was following rules, and then forgot that I forgot.
Gitelman raises another layer of the problem: we always understand new media through the frameworks of old ones. When the phonograph first appeared, it was called "a speaking newspaper." Early web pages mimicked the layout of printed documents. This is not just an interesting historical observation. It means that every new medium, from the moment it is born, is already framed by older ways of thinking. When I call AI a "tool," am I doing the same thing? "Tool" implies that I control it, that it serves me. But what if it is also quietly shaping the way I write prompts, the order in which I organize my thoughts, even my standards for what counts as "good writing"?
Protocols shape how I use media, and my usage reinforces those protocols. I cannot even tell whether the rules I am following as I write this—paragraphs need arguments, endings need closure—are my own habits or just another layer of protocol I can no longer see.