Human as Media

Recent Posts - page 2

• Effects of writing: arrest of the flow and completeness of the story

  By Andrey Mir on December 4, 2024 • ( 0 )

  

  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 ›

• Effects of writing: Fragmentation of the flow and structuring of the world

  By Andrey Mir on November 29, 2024 • ( 0 )

  

  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

  By Andrey Mir on November 14, 2024 • ( 0 )

  

  (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 Digital Rush

  By Andrey Mir on October 31, 2024 • ( 0 )

  

  In the early 2010s, old institutions transitioned to Web 2.0 and adopted the values of early digital users—young, urban, educated, progressive. The news media, desperately hoping for digital prospects after losing traditional revenues, were the first and the most affected… Read More ›

• The birth of the Viral Inquisitor

  By Andrey Mir on October 28, 2024 • ( 0 )

  

  Social media increasingly serve not to facilitate conversations but to sort out everyone’s attitude toward the most pressing issues. The wrong response to someone’s hard-fought truth is punished by reciprocal aggression and various forms of ostracism. An excerpt from the… Read More ›

• Eight theses on digital media literacy

  By Andrey Mir on September 23, 2024 • ( 1 )

  

  A manifesto of cooperation with the inevitable[i] 1. Media literacy is cooperation with the inevitable 1.1. Media have evolved from implements to environments. One can operate with a stone ax – but within the Internet. People can harness an instrumental… Read More ›

• Big implications of small efforts: how the instant gratification for the click changes our sensorium

  By Andrey Mir on August 28, 2024 • ( 0 )

  

  Unlike rewards in the physical world, the reward of a click is as trifling as the effort expended. The low quality incites a huge demand for quantity: sensing a hint of pleasure but never satiation, people spend more and more… Read More ›

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology

  By Andrey Mir on August 19, 2024 • ( 2 )

  

  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

  By Andrey Mir on August 4, 2024 • ( 1 )

  

  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 ›

• The list of forbidden books on media ecology

  By Andrey Mir on June 11, 2024 • ( 2 )

  

  As was the case with McLuhan, academia still struggles to appreciate media ecology. Communication departments tend to divide the field between an administrative approach and cultural criticism. The administrative approach, most clearly associated with the Columbia School and later empirical/effects-oriented… Read More ›

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