Mir McLuhanism – Econlib

• …digital media, not only improve exchange of information and rendering of life offline obsolete-they too reverse literacy and to recover orality.

• … This book is about orality, once obsolete by writing, and about literacy, which is now becoming obsolete by digital media.

• —Andrei Mir, The digital future in the rearview mirror: Jaspers’ axial age and Logan’s alphabet effect(pg. 10)

TThe year 1969 saw the premiere of Sesame Street on public television. In the years immediately following, adults extolled the virtues of the program. They proclaimed that it was about teaching children to read. I said to myself, and sometimes out loud: “No. It’s about teaching children to watch television.

In high school, there was a avant-garde English teacher who introduced us to Marshall McLuhan, known for his slogan “the medium is the message”. My cynicism about Sesame Street was based on McLuhan’s insistence that the nature of the medium would have a stronger effect than its content.

Andrey Mir calls McLuhan and his fellow travelers media environmentalists. Besides McLuhan, he cites Eric Havelock, Harold Innis, Jack Goody, Walter Ong, Neil Postman and others.

Mir argues that media ecology explains many of the cultural changes we are experiencing. Many of us would say that we are suffering from these cultural changes, as the Enlightenment values ​​of free speech, objective inquiry, and the dignity of the individual seem to be disappearing.

Mir writes,

• Why do people on social media become so polarized and deaf to logic and reason? Why do people read less and demand more? How are social networks changing mentalities and society? What happens next? The answer is digital orality. (pg. 14)

Mir considers the invention of alphabetical writing as a useful “rear-view mirror” to support his analysis. Following Robert Logan, Mir views alphabetical writing as a means of preparing minds for intense concentration and abstraction. Mir argues that alphabetic writing therefore created the conditions necessary for the cultural changes that Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age”. The Axial Era, around 500 BC, corresponds to the time when humans began to see themselves in relation to history and to an all-powerful deity. Our notions of scholarship, argumentation, empirical observation, and logic all emerged in the Axial era.

Consider the changes that took place when humans moved from simple face-to-face oral communication to the ability to read and write. Writing gives us a powerful form of social memory, reducing our need to rely on individual memory. Preliterate man lives in a multisensory present. For literate people, a more introverted existence becomes possible. While we read, we disconnect from the world in order to concentrate on the inputs of our visual sense. We can detach ourselves from the present to dwell on the past and the future. Instead of relying on our instant reactions, we stop to think and think about what we read. We relate to descriptions of people and events that are outside of our personal experience.

Reading forces us to think abstractly. This is especially true for alphabetical writing. The meaning of symbols on a page is not explicit. We must interpret and calculate meaning.

When only oral communication is available, collective memory must take the form of received wisdom. We value the person who can repeat sacred stories with great fidelity. With writing, there is room for reflection. We can value the person who asks questions or who criticizes.

Writing allowed for the codification of laws, ultimately leading to impersonal conceptions of justice. The printing press, Gutenberg’s successor, allowed for the widespread reproduction of thought, which made possible the scientific method of testing the reproducibility of results.

How does the spread of electronic media, especially in the 21st century, affect our brains and our society?

Mir says new media emphasizes quick reaction and not thinking. They distract us from contemplative reading with addictive distractions.

With the advent of cable news,

• Television stopped being news-centered and started being viewer-centered. This decision reversed the control exercised over emotions by the print media and co-opted the agonistic mentality both on air and among viewers, triggering the process of cultural and political polarization (which skyrocketed 15 years later with the advancement of social media). (pg. 244)

Mir says modern media is behind the rise of identity politics.

• Digital orality recreates an environment in which collective indoctrination is encouraged while personal inquiry is suppressed. (p. 217)

• The truth is a referendum by likes. (page 228)

• It becomes increasingly difficult to resist the “peer pressure” of the tribe when the objective truth does not match the truths of the tribe. (p.235)

So where are we now? Mir remarks,

• …blog posts were the last texts of the Gutenberg era. (p. 317)

This makes me wonder about the reader demographics of Substack essays, which are reminiscent of blog posts. I fear that this readership will be the majority over 50 years old.

• Digital speech has the characteristics of oral and written communication. Similar to oral speech, it allows the instantaneous exchange of responses; Similar to writing, it leaves a trace behind and can be transmitted across time and space. These characteristics imply that people’s spontaneous and especially emotional efforts to establish their social status in conversation are no longer evanescent. The interactions of millions of people are accumulated, broadcast and displayed for everyone to react to.

• This new type of conversation has its advantages. It enables socialization at an unprecedented pace and scale. But the ease of digital discourse has shifted the emphasis of communication from thoughts to reflexes, from substance to attitude. Social media requires everyone to relate to others, to their ideas, to their problems and achievements, to their very existence. The viral editor of the blogosphere has become the viral inquisitor of social media.

• (On the Internet), authors do not share physical space and type their responses in isolation. Furthermore, such a conversation often has more than two interlocutors and the exchange becomes chaotic. The oral thematic-rhematic dependence of responses on previous utterances is often broken, and written syntax does not apply either. All of this makes digital conversation a strange hybrid in which people often simply don’t hear each other. Their dialogue is not coherent; it’s fragmented, causing the emotional frustration so typical of digital conversations.

• Additionally, since digital speech is recorded, it is not just a simple exchange; it is an exchange displayed to others who can judge and contribute. It is therefore an exchange aimed at affecting others. The agonistic mentality of orality flourishes in digital orality and further amplifies frustration and polarization.
  (pp. 318-319)

Mir goes on to say that like buttons, emojis and other forms of digital communication are even more primitive than speech. It’s more about grunts and gestures. He writes,

• …digital orality trains the brain to experience tiny, repetitive hormonal gratification for tiny efforts at participation or even for simple presence. (p. 319)

And where are we going? In just one brief section, Mir suggests that we humans are on the verge of leaving the real world to live entirely in the virtual world.

I found this prognosis, and indeed the entire book, intriguing, but speculative. It seems plausible that the human brain and culture were affected by literacy in general and literacy in particular, as media ecologists claim. And it is plausible that the apparent decline in support for Enlightenment ways of thinking can be attributed to the evolution of digital media.

But media ecologists do not subject their hypotheses to rigorous empirical testing. They are not looking for natural experiments that can demonstrate that the causal mechanisms they propose are at work.

Many observers have noted and lamented the abandonment of objectivity in academia and journalism. Some attribute this to an ideological takeover by postmodernists and leftists – the so-called Gramscian march through institutions. Others attribute part of the responsibility to the feminization of institutions, with women bringing their social tools to impose conformity on campuses and in newsrooms.

Even theorists like Jonathan Haidt, who see social media as the source of many ills, point to specific strategies and tactics employed by large corporations as the problem. Just as Sesame Street fans hoped that television could be reformed for social good, Haidt seems to hope that with better standards and guidelines, the harms of social media can be contained. A follower of McLuhan would be skeptical.