Media as equalizer: digital orality and global anti-globalism

By Andrey Mir on July 1, 2025 • ( 0 )

Global swarming may turn out to be more disastrous than global warming.

Besides providing historical linearity and progress in social development, media also serve as a historical equalizer. An excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (available on Amazon).

Jaspers’ Axial Age signified the “awakening” of humankind – the discovery of basic ethical and metaphysical universals in which all humans eventually come to think. We can call it the Axial imperative: the thinkers of the Axial Age revealed universals common to humankind as a whole – the universals to which all cultures and peoples arrive, whether naturally or forcibly.

The Axial imperative also means that all Axial discoveries or achievements, regardless of their origin, become common assets of humankind. Whatever was invented in this global cultural movement by the Hebrews, Greeks, Persians, Indians, Chinese, or other cultures that joined the Axial movement later – became the property of all when humankind transitioned from many local histories to one world history.

Jaspers claimed, in 1949, that this stage – world history – had just commenced. This became evident even at the formal level: the first global planetary government in history was created – the League of Nations (1920), followed by the United Nations (1945). Notably, both were established in the aftermath of the World Wars, which were also global events confirming Jaspers’ “Schema of world history.”

As people generally seek the same living conditions due to their biological and social nature, all advanced technologies that supposedly provide these conditions eventually become distributed across the planet by market forces or governments. Every country possesses electricity, medicine, a financial system, computers, and abstract science. The cultural and technological differences between countries may be significant, but they are incomparable to those of the past. Important events in any country will resonate in the global news agenda. Some events are innately global, such as financial crises, major internet innovations, or pandemics.

What makes them global? Media. Media of transportation made trade, wars, and epidemics global. There were no global wars or pandemics before transportation connected all continents. Communication media created a global economy in which a sneeze at the Tokyo or Hong Kong stock market can turn into a fever in Johannesburg or Toronto. Capitalism, a media effect of the printing press, takes care of developing new drugs and distributing them worldwide. Producers of new movies and musicals dream of a world premiere.

The synchronization of global history has been happening from its beginning, very slowly at first, and increasingly accelerating recently. It took millennia for writing to spread, centuries for printing, and decades for electricity. The internet and social media seized the world historically in an instant. AI will not care about geographically seizing the world at all, as the entire world is already delivered to it in the form of the internet. Digital media have completed the synchronization of world history.

In the process of media synchronization, all surviving cultures joined the common patterns of historical development – the Axial imperative. Electronic and especially digital media made the origin of knowledge no longer matter. Digital media have become the final and ultimate historical and cultural equalizer.

The total unity might not have happened yet, but the trend is evident, and this trend is accelerating. The unity of the world, as Jaspers predicted, is becoming increasingly apparent, despite the news’ portrayals of the world being shattered. Furthermore, the very impression of the world being shattered is evidence of its burgeoning unity.

Nativist or progressist backlashes to global media synchronization – to globalism – still persist here and there. Also, calls for cultural diversity maintain the impression of a deep divide between people based on their personal, ethnic, religious, or cultural identities. In full compliance with the law of reversal, universalism is denied by the very people who contribute to it the most; moreover, denying the universalism of others is itself a perversive form of universalism. It does not affect the synchronization of the world by media anyway, as all people seek the same media extensions.

Media synchronization does not make people and cultures similar, but it makes them connected into humankind. A view from any point in the past or from a distant planet will immediately expose how insignificant any divide is amid the growing oneness of the all-humankind agenda.

Jaspers believed that the unity of humankind could materialize either as a “world order” or a “world empire.” In the mid-20th century, following the defeat of Nazi Germany and during the victorious expansion of the Soviet regime, the fate of humankind was envisioned as either democratic or totalitarian. However, when the future arrived, it turned out to be much more complex and mixed.

Electronic media facilitated retribalization, and digital media boosted it even more. Under the pressure of digital orality, the influence of literacy weakens in highly literate societies and vanishes in societies with strong oral backgrounds. Additionally, electronic and digital media informed societies with a strong oral residue about better opportunities abroad and enabled the new global wave of migration, comparable to or even exceeding the previous waves of migration triggered by the printing press and telegraph/radio. Those migration waves were the carriers of literacy, but the latest one represents rather a massive movement of people from societies with a strong oral tradition, as this wave comes predominantly from cultures with 2–3 or fewer generations of full literacy.

Since digital media have equalized the global pace of history, some of those cultures have skipped the print, television, or sometimes even desktop PC stages of literacy development and joined the Axial imperative outright at the stage of smartphones. These cultures experience a unique amalgamation of primary orality with digital orality, thus “outperforming” the Greeks, who jumped from primary orality right to alphabetic literacy, with all the shocks this rapid transition entailed.

As a result, a new global mix of orality and literacy has emerged. The positions of print literacy are challenged by the conjoining forces of digital orality, on one hand, and the migration of strong oral traditions, on the other. Despite many cultural differences, digital orality and oral tradition are nevertheless morphologically compatible in their assault on print literacy.

Since we are all now connected, the global retrieval of orality is leading to global balkanization, a weird type of cultural fragmentation that in fact is uniting all of humanity. The impending uniformity of humankind appears less structured than what world democracy or world totalitarianism in Jaspers’ predictions might have implied. Instead, humankind seems to be facing tribal globalism with its very chaotic political and cultural unity provided by digital media. Global swarming may turn out to be more disastrous than global warming.

Andrey Mir

An excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (available on Amazon).

See also books by Andrey Mir: