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 ›
Media Ecology
Time travel and media ecology
A review of Paul Levinson’s “The Plot to Save Socrates” (2006). Time-travel stories are commonly used to explore questions of logic, ethics, philosophy, and social organization. Paul Levinson’s “The Plot to Save Socrates” (2006) adds media ecology to this set…. Read More ›
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 in Discourse. Contemporary humanity is a child lost in the woods, haunted by… Read More ›
Agonistic mentality of oral culture
On social media, everyone seeks affirmation from others on a scale unheard of in human history. Not only is the agonistic mentality making a comeback from the oral era, but it also threatens representative democracy (by amplifying polarization) and people’s… Read More ›
Ripple effect of writing: how literacy changed thinking and society
Writing – temple bureaucracy – bookkeeping – palace economy – irrigation, management, engineering – archiving – libraries – classification and cataloguing – codes of laws – scribe schools – semiotics and syntax – priests-scholars – abstract thinking. A chapter from Digital… 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 ›
The mystery of Greece – III: Pirates and the tragic spirit
The tragic spirit brought by the nomads found especially fertile soil in Greece. There, the tragic spirit was elevated from a form of frustration to a sense of heroic self-actualization and the noblest dramatic genre. A chapter from Digital Future in… 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 ›
Human as Media 