Electronic media, as McLuhan noted, retribalized society and therefore diminished the significance and influence of literacy. Retribalization of culture by the switch from literacy media to digital media reverses social communication not just back to orality, but even to the… Read More ›
Media ecology
Factoid. Validation by dissemination
In their newsfeed, everyone can occasionally get videos of a bear swimming in a backyard pool, a husky dog teaching a human baby to crawl, or a bunch of school bullies harassing a classmate. The video format certifies that those… Read More ›
Old media and COVID-19: news demand surges, business crumbles
Because of the quarantine, newspapers are going to die tomorrow, not in 10 years. The forever-altered tactility of the millions will harm the press even more than the temporary physical isolation from its readers. Radio will struggle but survive and… Read More ›
Figure/ground analysis of Trumpism
Donald Trump as the president of the USA will be gone sooner or later. However, the conditions that made Trump’s ascension to the presidency possible will continue to impact politics and culture. These conditions can be generally described as societal… Read More ›
The Pyramid against the Cloud: Institutions’ perplexity regarding the Net
“Beyond Washington DC, Donald Trump, and impeachment, there lies a great big world – and that world, at the moment, is being convulsed by a remarkable number of revolts against political authority”, writes Martin Gurri. Indeed, who would have thought…. 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 ›
Reading list for a young media thinker
What to read to be read. What to quote to be quoted. The list is always under upgrade. What is highly recommended is highlighted. Any good additions are welcome. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows:… 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 ›