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 ›
Immersive experience
The disservices of the alphabet. Environmental withdrawal.
The social trauma of the alphabet involved the dissolution of society based on tribal unity and kinship. Now, digital orality reverses the media effects of the alphabet and retrieves some features of tribal orality. One of the disservices brought by… Read More ›
The Medium Is the Menace
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.
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 ›
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 ›
New senses, electronically induced. How gadgets reshape the human sensorium
Moving further into the digital world, we will be able to induce not just familiar but completely new, never before known senses. For example, a banking chip implanted under the skin may, one day, create the sense of a full… Read More ›
The next Big Thing: simulation of mind or replacement of body?
Efficient simulation of mind will win the technological race with efficient replacement of body Space transportation, teleportation, human resettlement into a better body – all these things are both too primitive and too complicated. They are going to disturb the… Read More ›
Text? No longer
Some thoughts on possible obsolescence in the Media Studies Triangle, Ontario Media Literacy Program “In 1988, Ontario became the first educational jurisdiction in the world to mandate media literacy as part of the English curriculum”, reports the “Media Education: Make… Read More ›
Human as Media 