Media are the hardware of society, and culture is its software; a change in hardware makes all habitual software obsolete and disrupts the previous balances in human conditions. New book, The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media… Read More ›
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology by Andrey Mir (2024) has just been published. Buy it on Amazon. Andrey Mir is the most profound observer of media, traditional and digital, writing today. No one else comes… Read More ›
Has anyone else writing today about the Internet and the new media it’s spawned, come off sounding as much like McLuhan on steroids? A triple review of Andrey Mir’s: (Excerpts from William Kuhns’ review in: New Explorations: Studies in Culture… Read More ›
Is the rise of digital media causing the fall of literacy? A review of Andrey Mir’s Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect in City Journal, excerpts. Despite the hopes and fears invested in… Read More ›
Primary orality – Craft Literacy – Phantom Literacy – Semi-literacy – General Literacy – Residual Orality – Secondary Orality (Electronic Orality) – Emancipated Authorship – Digital Orality – Digital Sensorium. An excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial… Read More ›
Historical periods have a distinctive temporal characteristic in their progression: each following historical period was shorter than the previous one. History accelerated because the change of media forced it. An excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age… Read More ›
In Mir’s big new book, Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror, he explains how media made history and may soon end it. A review by Martin Gurri in Discourse. Contemporary humanity is a child lost in the woods, haunted by… Read More ›
On social media, everyone seeks affirmation from others on a scale unheard of in human history. Not only is the agonistic mentality making a comeback from the oral era, but it also threatens representative democracy (by amplifying polarization) and people’s… Read More ›
Writing – temple bureaucracy – bookkeeping – palace economy – irrigation, management, engineering – archiving – libraries – classification and cataloguing – codes of laws – scribe schools – semiotics and syntax – priests-scholars – abstract thinking. A chapter from Digital… Read More ›
Despite all the similarities between pirates and nomads, there was an aspect that distinguished them. Seafarers had to possess universal skills that could be required for survival when nobody was around. A chapter from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’… Read More ›
Human as Media 