Phd in JOINT INTERNATIONAL DOCTORATE IN SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS,
CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION

Thesis title: POST-DIGITAL EUROPE: SOCIETY, POLITICS AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE AGE OF GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - The Transformation of the European Public Sphere

This dissertation investigates how digital technologies—particularly generative artificial intelligence (AI)—are transforming European public institutional communication, conceived as an activity of public utility and how these transformations are reshaping the European public sphere. It argues that Europe must be understood not as a fixed institutional entity but as a symbolic and discursive project continually reconstituted through communication, representation and mediation. Within this perspective, communication is not ancillary to governance but constitutive of European legitimacy, identity and democratic vitality. The thesis introduces and theorises post-digitality as a new paradigm for analysing the contemporary socio-technical condition in which human and machine agencies converge to produce meaning. Within this framework, generative AI—manifested through institutional chatbots and other agentic systems—reconfigures the communicative infrastructures that link institutions and citizens. Authority, authorship and authenticity become hybrid and algorithmically mediated, while institutional narratives and public perceptions of Europe are increasingly shaped by computational processes that blur the boundaries between discourse and data, participation and automation, mediation and cognition. Grounded in three disciplinary traditions—political science, the sociology of communication and media studies and social representations theory—the research employs a qualitative and multi-sited design combining policy analysis, elite interviews and participant observation of EU communication practices. It traces the evolution of European public institutional communication from technocratic information models and participatory paradigms to the algorithmic and generative architectures of the post-digital era. Findings reveal that the long-standing communication deficit persists, but now unfolds within a hybrid public sphere where legitimacy is negotiated through both human deliberation and machine mediation. The thesis introduces two additional conceptual tools: quasi-alterity, denoting the emergence of AI as a communicative “other” within institutional discourse; and utilitarian consensus, describing a pragmatic, outcome-oriented form of public alignment. Together, these frameworks clarify how AI reshapes the epistemic, affective and normative dimensions of legitimacy in Europe. By positioning communication at the intersection of society, politics and technology, the study advances an original theoretical model for understanding European integration in the age of generative AI. It concludes that the EU’s legitimacy increasingly depends on its capacity to sustain trust, meaning and participation within a post-digital European public sphere that is simultaneously human and algorithmic in character.