digital media ecology
The immersive, turbulent, mediatized flow.
It’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters.
digital media ecology
So central is communication to the process of control that the two have become the joint subject of the modern science of cybernetics, defined by one of its founders as "the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal
James R. Beniger • The Control Revolution by James R. Beniger
As the Soviet paleoanthropologist Boris Porshnev once noted, thought and speech require the inhibition of natural reflexes. The need to formulate thoughts and sentences mediates our gut reactions. This makes humans slowpokes compared with animals, but it also facilitates deliberation and cooperation, conferring evolutionary benefits. Writing is the... See more
Andrey Mir • The Viral Inquisitor
... See moreThis rearrangement of social and economic conditions around the pursuit of attention is, I'm going to argue, a transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism and the creation of wage labor as the central form of human toil. Attention now exists as a commodity in the same way labor did in the early years of industrial capitalism.
The
What defines orality as a cognitive and cultural trait is not vocal performance, but its opposition to literacy, which forms the dichotomy “environmental/tribal immersion vs. detachment.” Similar to the condition of primary orality, digital media enable environmental immersion.
Andrey Mir • The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution
Different genres, same engine: trust earned through charisma, resonance, and the steady performance of alignment, inside a media ecology built for niches.
Renee DiResta • Crisis of Trust 2026: The Retreat Into Insularity
The worlds we now inhabit are digitized realms incapable by their nature and design of generating a broadly shared experience of reality.
L. M. Sacasas • From Common Sense to Bespoke Realities
we run into problems precisely when we start treating technology as an end rather than a means to an end. This is not to say that we can’t be legitimately impressed with technical achievements on their own terms, of course, or admire the skill that makes them possible. But we do well to also judge technologies according to the greater ends they... See more
What Is To Be Done? — Fragments
We're developing new cognitive abilities. We just don't know what they are yet.
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