The latest book by media theorist Andrey Mir raises hypotheses that are as lucid as they are unsettling about the future of literate culture and the human race itself. By Eugenio Palopoli. This is a review of The Digital Reversal… Read More ›
Media ecology
Everything you know and everything you are is becoming its opposite
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 ›
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 ›
Media as equalizer: digital orality and global anti-globalism
Global swarming may turn out to be more disastrous than global warming. Besides providing historical linearity and progress in social development, media also serve as a historical equalizer. An excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s… 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 ›
Screen time is stolen time: 19 digital rules for kids and families
This is an appendix to my review of Michel Desmurget’s 2022 book Screen Damage: The Dangers of Digital Media for Children. At the end of the book, Desmurget suggests “Seven Fundamental Rules.” However, they do not actually resemble a clear list, so I have… Read More ›
Effects of writing: arrest of the flow and completeness of the story
Primary orality had some capacities for fragmenting—oral communication was naturally constrained by time and space. The digital flow is not. An excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect. Our life is immersed in… Read More ›
Human as Media 