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 ›
Marshall McLuhan
Media platforms of mind
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 ›
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 ›
Replaying history backward
We expect that new media will do new tricks to cover our old needs. We always think they will improve something we already have. Sometimes they do, but on their own terms. Eventually, media always condition us to do completely… 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.
Media literacy and media engineering to fight polarization
How can the CENTER, not the extremes, become better liked, shared, and more profitable at the level of the very design of social media and the news media? The answer is worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Mind Map of Media Ecology
A review of Lance Strate’s “Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition”.
There are no phenomena that we experience without mediation of our tools, interfaces, and technologies. So, what else, if not media, do we need to learn first and foremost about everything to get that everything right?
The medium is the breakage
With the limited access to authorship in the predigital eras, the linear and structured written narrative fostered “long-range” rationality. Non-literate media, starting with radio, TV and now the internet, favour “short-sighted” emotionality.
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 ›
McLuhan and resettling into the digital
“McLuhan foresaw that electronic media gave humans the quality of a disembodied, angel-like spirit, which happens to us right now when we literally resettle to social media or video games and operate our digital selves.” Mike Hodgkinson published in Post… Read More ›
Human as Media 