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 ›
Digital Environment
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 shrinking of media eras: the Singularity countdown
Historical periods have a distinctive temporal characteristic in their progression: each following historical period was shorter than the previous one. History accelerated because the change of media forced it. An excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age… Read More ›
The Fifth Wave: Andrey Mir takes on world history
In Mir’s big new book, Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror, he explains how media made history and may soon end it. A review by Martin Gurri on Discourse. Contemporary humanity is a child lost in the woods, haunted by… Read More ›
The mystery of Greece – IV: Piracy and the alphabet
Despite all the similarities between pirates and nomads, there was an aspect that distinguished them. Seafarers had to possess universal skills that could be required for survival when nobody was around. A chapter from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’… Read More ›
“It’s a race between the ‘digital sensorium’ and the nuclear launch.”
A discussion about digital orality and reversal from literacy to orality on the internet – from the Worker and Parasite Podcast, January 30, 2024. In this episode, we discuss Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s… Read More ›
From orality to literacy: from collective indoctrination to personal inquiring (and now back)
The habit of inquiring, brought by literacy, corrupted oral indoctrination. This all began to reverse with electronic media. Amusement, induced by electronic media, undermined the conditions favourable for inquiry. When people are absorbed into emotional resonance with the tube, less… 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 ›
Yellowstone wolves and media-determinism
A chapter from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet. Explaining the incredible complexity of social, political, cultural, and economic life through the clay tablet or papyrus was sometimes labeled as a fallacy of techno-determinism…. 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 ›
Human as Media 