CONCEPT
Recontextualization
The deliberate, institutional practice of embedding AI-mediated information within situated engagement — On AI's prescriptive response to the decontextualization that AI tools perform as their fundamental operation.
Recontextualization is the name On AI gives to the institutional work of preserving the conditions under which practitioners develop the situated understanding that AI tools do not provide. It is neither integration without redesign (which accepts the decontextualization and produces practitioners who are more productive but less wise) nor restriction without redesign (which refuses the tools but offers nothing in their place). It is the third path: accepting the tools, redesigning the context of learning to preserve the situated engagement that the tools would otherwise eliminate, and investing in the social infrastructure of knowledge production that is structurally invisible in output metrics but indispensable at moments of crisis.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The practical implementation of recontextualization involves four elements Lave's framework identifies as what tools cannot provide: legitimate peripheral participation (the gradual trajectory from newcomer to full practitioner), community membership (the social infrastructure of professional knowledge), the context of struggle (the friction-rich encounters through which tacit understanding is deposited), and the social production