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 ›
Both horses and ships gave their masters opportunistic (“tip-and-run”) superiority over sedentary cultures. A chapter from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect. (Previously in the chapter: The pirates of the Aegean and the opportunistic… Read More ›
Piracy prepared the Greek minds for the effects of the alphabet. This might explain why the alphabet effect in Greece was so instant and so transformative. A chapter from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet… Read More ›
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 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 ›
As a state of mind, orality preceded literacy, but nothing preceded orality. Humans might have “invented” literacy, but they did not invent orality. It came with the factory settings of Homo sapiens. A section from Chapter “The features of orality”… Read More ›
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 ›
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 ›
…With writing, shamans became priests and magic turned into religion. Thus, irrigation is the mother of writing, and the bureaucrat is the second oldest profession.
Individual media development of children should repeat the evolution of the species – step by step, not leapfrogging to the last and most attractive stage, digital media.
Human as Media 