The miniscule but instant hormonal reward for a mere click rewires the brain and reshapes society. We’re not just spending time on the Internet. We are investing time in its improvement.
Future and Futurology
The Medium Is the Emancipation
Human as media: The Emancipation of Authorship is the potential given to the majority of citizens to promote (or publish) their ideas far beyond their immediate circle.
Media and responsibility for their effects: instrumental vs. environmental views
When used by a person, a fence is an instrument to protect and defend, a further extension of the skin, beyond clothes and huts. However, when used by a culture, a fence is an environmental force that transforms a nomadic… Read More ›
Scheduling the extinction of newspapers
Newspapers are in decline because of economic and technological factors, but their life span is measured by demographic factors. They will exist as an industrial product for no longer than the mid-2030s. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of… Read More ›
Interjections and emojis: the digital reversal of literacy back to the origin of language
Radio and television returned vocal signals and gestures into communicating socially significant content. The postmodernist replacement of feelings with intensities goes hand in hand with the replacement of literacy by orality and the retribalization of culture by electronic media. A… Read More ›
AI to Bypass Creativity. Will Robots Replace Journalists? (The Answer Is “Yes”). Part I: Intro
Journalism is a creative human practice. This, according to widespread opinion, makes it harder for robots to replicate. However, writing algorithms are already widely used in the news media to produce articles and thereby replace human journalists. In 2016, Wordsmith,… Read More ›
The post-truth world: how social media destroy the absolutism of the “objective” truth
Monotheistic religion, scientific ethic, and writing alienated truth from personal experience. Social media return truth from priests to people. Nobody likes it. In 2016, Oxford Dictionary declared ‘post-truth’ to be the Word of the Year. The dictionary explains the adjective… Read More ›
Transcending Human Sensorium
People still act in virtual reality in a mostly natural way, as “physical beings”, which is obviously predefined by their (our) previous experience. Moreover, the content of the virtual reality is still the physical reality. This reflects McLuhanian ideas of… Read More ›
Altering Human Sensorium
Artificial flavours, augmented senses, immersive media, augmented reality, virtual reality By shaping the media environment, media are able to tune the human sensorium according to their “bias”. Equipped with ideasthesia/synesthesia, the sensorium follows the environment. In its turn, thanks to… Read More ›
Virtual reality technology is a dead-end of media evolution
Admiration and oblivion, the same prospects Google Glass are facing, are waiting ahead for virtual reality technology. This is not necessarily due to the difficulties in VR-content production (VR-consumers have had little to consume so far); it is the bulkiness… Read More ›