Author Archives
Media futurologist
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Before AI eats it all: Fall reading, human edition
Just a small catalog of essential books on media ecology, postjournalism, digital orality, and AI. Seasonal marketing is a cheap trick, of course, and among people interested in media, book choices most likely aren’t really driven by discounts. Yet this… Read More ›
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New book: The Technological Imperative. Why we develop our media. Essays on human agency and AI
As media evolution is driven by the technological imperative (media seeking better performance), AI may not need agency at all. Hello, media determinists. This blog was paused for a while because I was busy finishing my book The technological imperative. Why… Read More ›
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The Washington Post: will the endowment save the day? (A day, maybe.)
As The Washington Post moved to cut about one-third of its staff, including roughly 300 of its 800 journalists, some critics turned on its owner, Jeff Bezos: given his massive fortune, why not simply absorb the losses and keep funding the paper… Read More ›
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Postjournalism: The reversal of the media from news supply to news validation
A chapter from The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution. With the internet, news reliability might have degraded, but overall, people became better informed. This flipped the value in content production: news stopped being a commodity and became bait to attract… Read More ›
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The great digital reversal
The latest book by media theorist Andrey Mir raises hypotheses that are as lucid as they are unsettling about the future of literate culture and the human race itself. By Eugenio Palopoli. This is a review of The Digital Reversal… Read More ›
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Everything you know and everything you are is becoming its opposite
A review of Andrey Mir’s “The Digital Reversal.” By William Kuhns. From the upcoming issue of New Explorations. Studies in Culture and Communication. At first blush it sounds like a 21st century fairy tale: how at enough clicks of the “I like” thumb-ups icon, everything… Read More ›
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Review of Andrey Mir’s The Digital Reversal: Media, Social Media, AI, and the Fate of Humanity. By Paul Levinson
Paul Levinson, a student of Neil Postman and a collaborator with Marshall McLuhan, became one of the first readers and critics of The Digital Reversal. Paul is the author of a number of books on media ecology and also a prominent… Read More ›
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Digital orality: The flip of text into texting
Media are the hardware of society, and culture is its software. Society follows the patterns set by media. If oral speech was the medium of orality and written speech was the medium of literacy, digital speech is the medium of… Read More ›
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New book: The Digital Reversal
The future of the book is the blurb, said Marshall McLuhan. As the future arrives, this book is written in tweets—1,295 of them. Structured in thread-chapters, they explore and explain what media evolution has done to us. (An excerpt from… Read More ›
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Media as equalizer: digital orality and global anti-globalism
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… Read More ›
Human as Media 