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 ›
Future of journalism
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 ›
The Digital Rush
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 Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology
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
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 ›
William Kuhns: Mir-roring McLuhan in the digital era
Has anyone else writing today about the Internet and the new media it’s spawned, come off sounding as much like McLuhan on steroids? A triple review of Andrey Mir’s: (Excerpts from William Kuhns’ review in: New Explorations: Studies in Culture… 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 in Discourse. Contemporary humanity is a child lost in the woods, haunted by… Read More ›
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 ›
How both old and new media polarise society for profit (or survival)
Why polarisation is a media effect and what we can do about it. Populism and polarisation are structurally embedded into this social-economic symbiosis. This media hardware can and must work only with this cultural software. Excerpts from the paper. Full… Read More ›
Martin Gurri on “Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers”
Andrey Mir’s previous book, “Human as Media”, was a little masterpiece that accounted for the large transformations brought about by the “emancipation of authorship” in the internet. His latest book, “Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers”, may be the most… Read More ›
Human as Media 