The detachment of literacy enabled a point-of-view, as opposed to the oralist point-of-being, to use Derrick de Kerckhove’s dichotomy.

Affordances make media not just environmental but terraforming forces. A species with a natural econiche similar to that of apes, wolves, or wild hogs has turned the entire planet into its econiche—because of media and their affordances. Media reshaped Earth to accommodate us.

The 1st corollary to Metcalfe’s law: the best platform is a monopolistic platform. If all users gather on one platform, all possible matches between them will occur.

The technological imperative extends its power over humans by affording us the ability to extract benefits from using media. Different media afford us different benefits, driving our selecting engagement with them. This selectivity is described by the concept of affordance.

Any social media activity is a request to unknown others for affirmation. It flips personal conversations into public exhibitions.

Censorship, algorithmic control, and the criminalization of more online behavior will only grow as digital platforms evolve and converge with the state. Both political elites and corporations seek more control; platformization will provide greater affordances for it. The ultimate reversal of former internet freedoms will produce either

Digital orality reverses knowledge acquisition from scientific inquiry, typical of literacy, to conversational inquiry, typical of orality. It rewires the brain, shifting knowledge of the world from complex, systematic categories to highly accessible but scattered anecdotes.

They have incompatible forms of social gravitation. In the Cloud, one’s gravitas comes from contributing time, content, and passion. Those with heavier contributions pull others into their orbits.

Oral speech is a dialog. We build the structure of conversation together. One person says something, and the next may add to it without constructing a full sentence. This makes the syntax of each utterance less important—we rely on each other to keep it flowing.