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 ›
Marshall McLuhan
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
The encyclopedia of the Toronto School of Communication
A review of Wisdom Weavers: The Lives and Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan by Tom Cooper (2025, Connected Editions*, with Preface by T. C. McLuhan and Foreword by Robert Logan; presale available on Amazon). Tom Cooper’s Wisdom Weavers: The Lives and Thought… Read More ›
Effects of writing. Thinking about thinking: logic and theorizing.
Alphabetic writing visualized not the objects or the ideas of objects but speech itself. Viewing recorded speech meant seeing the “footprints” of thinking. A chapter from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect. The… Read More ›
Effects of writing: Fragmentation of the flow and structuring of the world
Written words—and especially letters—halted and disassembled the natural flow of experience, reassembling it into the intelligible structure—knowledge. An excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect. …Biologically, life is immersed in the flow of… Read More ›
On Selfie as an Affirmation of Existence
(This is a pretentious probe; don’t read it if you’re not into such stuff) Andrey Mir See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology
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 ›
Our guide through the media labyrinth – foreward to Andrey Mir’s The Viral Inquisitor by Martin Gurri
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 ›