Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect

“A major theme of Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror is that the internet has pushed us to ‘digital orality,’ that is to say, to the forms of communication prevalent before the invention of writing. This brings in a long train of consequences, not least concerning the nature of truth.” – Martin Gurri, author of “The Revolt of the Public”

“Andrey Mir’s Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror describes the rise and fall of literate culture. Mir has sold me on the idea that what I think of as rational, scientific thinking comes from the way that our minds are shaped by reading. But as the written word gives way to electronic media, we are going to retreat from logic, objectivity, and the pursuit of truth.” – Arnold Kling, economist, author of “The Three Languages of Politics”

“An essential guide for understanding, getting on top of, and even improving the increasingly chaotic and dangerous world we all inhabit. Deeply researched, astutely reasoned, stylishly written, Mir’s latest book will become a classic in the study of media and their unpredictable effects.” – Paul Levinson, author of “Digital McLuhan”

This book explains digital tribalization.

• Digital media have reversed print literacy and retrieved orality in a new form – in the form of digital orality.
• Digital orality tests our tolerance by bringing other people much closer and even more intrusively than oral communication did – right onto our most intimate space, our screens.
• Digital orality rewinds the historical Axial Age. According to Karl Jaspers (1949), the Axial Age (the 8th–3rd centuries BCE), was a period of human “awakening.” Humans became aware of their own existence, giving rise to historical consciousness. Fundamental philosophical and religious doctrines emerged in several ancient cultures.
• At the time, there were no optics available to Jaspers to explain those pivotal changes. Meanwhile, in terms of media ecology, the Axial Age paralleled the spread of literacy. Writing allowed the “separation of the knower from the known” (Havelock) and the “inward turn” (Ong). Additionally, the “alphabet effect” (Logan) contributed to the emergence of monotheism, codified law, individualism, deductive logic, and abstract science. All these developments, enabled by literacy, occurred during Jaspers’ Axial Age.
• 2.5 millennia ago, the transition from orality to literacy marked the shift from myth to logos, from magic to faith, from polytheism to monotheism, from customs to laws, from moral relativism to moral absolute, from practical and negotiated truths to objective and absolute truth, from environmental and collective immersion to abstract thinking and individual detachment, from the “circle of life” to personal destiny, from the agitation of tribal belonging to the individual tragedy of (not-)becoming.
• Now, by reversing literacy and retrieving orality, digital media are replaying these processes backward. Media evolution thrusts us into a struggle between print literacy and digital orality.

Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror by Andrey Mir explores the digital future as the historical reversal of literacy through the lens of media determinism. The effects of orality and literacy are catalogued to observe which of them are reversed and retrieved in digital society. As soon as you accept this optic and see these effects, your life will become a captivating ethnographic expedition.