The latest book by media theorist Andrey Mir raises hypotheses that are as lucid as they are unsettling about the future of literate culture and the human race itself. By Eugenio Palopoli. This is a review of The Digital Reversal… Read More ›
Social media
Everything you know and everything you are is becoming its opposite
A review of Andrey Mir’s “The Digital Reversal.” By William Kuhns. From the upcoming issue of New Explorations. Studies in Culture and Communication. At first blush it sounds like a 21st century fairy tale: how at enough clicks of the “I like” thumb-ups icon, everything… Read More ›
Digital orality: The flip of text into texting
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 ›
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 ›
Effects of writing: arrest of the flow and completeness of the story
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 ›
On Selfie as an Affirmation of Existence
(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
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
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
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 ›
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 ›
Human as Media 