More than a year has passed since the chattering class, overly agitated by Trump’s return to the White House, finally split into two opposite bubbles on BlueSky and X/Twitter. It’s interesting to look at old forecasts and see how these bubbles have evolved. Have they ultimately cocooned into total degradation or are they still capable of engaging with broader public discourse?

In January 2025, I wrote that the explosive growth of Bluesky was close to exhaustion. The social media platform skyrocketed from 14 million in November, before Trump's re-election, to 30 million in January, an increase of 16 million in just three months. Since then, the growth has slowed down, of course, adding only 13 million over more than a year (43.5 million users on April 3, 2026).

I wrote then that “Bluesky, a smaller and likely more insular bubble than other social media platforms, also carries higher risks of marginalization.” It’s now hard to tell whose bubble is bubblier, X or BlueSky. It feels like X algorithms lately pull it away from full-fledged conservative ressentiment, blind to everything else. Judging by some complaints, BlueSky algorithms (or the BlueSky crowd?) do not seem inclined to do it. Is it a valid observation?

(The essay was originally published in Discourse in January 2025)

Political Divide Shapes Social Media Bubbles on X and Bluesky

Bluesky reached a milestone of 30 million users, proving that conservative-liberal segregation online has happened. How will this affect polarization?

For decades now, liberals and conservatives have sought their own friendly spaces in the media. The rise of cable news in the 1990s created echo chambers that allowed people on both sides of the political aisle to hear just what they wanted to hear—to be validated rather than challenged. Now, the great conservative-liberal split seems to have come to social media.

Earlier attempts, like Parler for conservatives and Mastodon for liberals, have mostly failed. But now, after Donald Trump’s return to the White House, user migration on social media platforms shows a clearer political separation. What will this mean for the future of polarization? Polarization only increased with the arrival of opinionated cable news, so the trend is certainly worth watching.

The Demographics of Social Media: Two Waves

From the start, social media platforms were dominated by liberal views, largely due to the demographics of their users. Early adopters were young, educated and urban—a group naturally aligned with a progressive worldview. They brought the anti-establishment “Revolt of the Public,” to use Martin Gurri’s term, and sparked grassroots Twitter revolutions everywhere, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street.

When traditional institutions rushed to build their own digital presence, they had to cater to these left-leaning audiences. As a result, media, entertainment, academia and corporations embraced the values of the most progressive strata, sidelining others. A paradoxical situation emerged: Because of the digital transformation, the establishment adopted the essentially disruptive culture of an anti-establishment minority.

Social media, however, continued to proliferate. By the mid-2010s, older, less educated, less urban and less progressive users arrived. They began discussing everything and soon revealed how different their views and values were from those represented in the progressive-dominated mainstream. This second, more conservative wave of social media users consolidated their anxiety into a political force, much like their progressive predecessors just a few years earlier.

These two demographic waves of social media adoption amplified the political split in society, fueling culture wars between digital progressives, who got to control most of the media discourse, and the growing conservative resentment about that. Though not always eloquent in the battle of narratives, conservatives still had an opportunity to resist through voting. In many places, representative democracy came into conflict with the progressive aristocracy.

Brexit, Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Germany’s AfD, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and many other right-leaning figures and movements emerged around the world and advanced through voting mechanisms, despite—or thanks to—the dominance of progressive views in the mainstream. By the late 2010s, the medium of elections had proved to be more diverse and inclusive than the diversity and inclusion promoted by progressives, as elections still represented the entire population, including conservatives.

Yet, having been promoted into the establishment during the Digital Rush of the early 2010s, progressives continued to dominate social media, now using these platforms not to challenge but to protect the establishment, to which they now belonged, from conservative pushback.

The Reign of the Twitterati

Before 2016, social media platforms encouraged engagement and paid little attention to its side effects. One major side effect was the amplification of extremes: Seeking socialization and competing for responses, users engaged more actively with agitating content, leading naturally to polarization. Discussions quickly descended into quarrels. Political activists and operatives, both domestic and foreign, also exploited the potential for fast, efficient and uncontrolled personal engagement. Platforms readily facilitated all this and rarely interfered, proclaiming “content neutrality.” Their commitment to neutrality, however, did not mean actual political neutrality; rather, it was a formal stance intended to shield them from liability for content posted by users.

This protection began to fade after Trump’s surprise win in 2016. Political elites found an explanation for Trump’s shocking victory: Russian meddling. The practice of blaming social media for enabling Russia’s hostile activities soon expanded to include other bad actors, primarily political opponents. This was partly justified: Social media platforms do amplify contrarian views and undermine the authority of traditional institutions. This is what social media did for progressives in the early 2010s. After progressives became co-opted by institutions, social media just kept doing the same—but now the platforms empowered conservatives against the newly formed alliance of progressives and institutions.

Progressives now wanted to neutralize the very source of disruption that had once propelled them to power. They started demanding censorship—who could have imagined this just five years earlier? The most astute among them didn’t just demand it—they helped develop the mechanisms of combating disinformation.

Shaken by the Cambridge Analytica scandal over harvesting personal data for political targeting, Facebook appeared eager to avoid political risks altogether. It shifted its algorithms to depoliticize conversations, prioritizing users’ interactions with family and friends. Twitter, on the other hand, could not effectively suppress politicization due to its design: Short tweets invited impulsive political sharing and commenting. The platform had to engage in sophisticated content moderation of the right, which inevitably reinforced liberal voices. By 2022, Democratic-leaning users comprised two-thirds of the top 10% of tweeters, who produced 92% of the platform’s content. The growing left-leaning political power of Twitter earned them the title “Twitterati.”

The Twitterati became so influential that they affected HR decisions and editorial policy at the leading news outlets, contributing to the rise of postjournalism. For example, it was mainly the backlash from the Twitterati that forced The New York Times to abandon any attempts at balancing its coverage in 2020, leading to the resignations of op-ed editor James Bennet and writer Bari Weiss after they dared to present opposing views in the paper. “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor,” wrote Weiss in her resignation letter.

Parler: Conservatives in Exile

Following escalating content moderation on major platforms, many conservative users migrated to alternative social networks. Parler, a notable example, grew explosively in 2020: It went from under 1 million users early that year to becoming the most downloaded app in the U.S. in November, the election month. In a week after the 2020 election, Parler gained 3.5 million users, eventually reaching 15 million in January 2021.

However, its rapid growth and conservative user base immediately made Parler a target. Due to their agitating nature, social media platforms with little or no moderation—from the early 2010s’ Twitter or Facebook to the later 2010s’ Telegram or Parler—are easy to blame for hosting extremists, especially from the perspective of the regimes those extremists oppose. Parler users were likely more involved in the January 6 riot than users of any other platform—simply because they had been expelled from other platforms and gathered on Parler.

After the January 6 Capitol attack, Parler was removed from app stores and soon went offline after Amazon canceled its hosting. Later attempts to return with stricter moderation failed, and Parler has never fully recovered. Sometimes called “Conservative Twitter,” Parler was literally “deplatformed” exactly when it was booming due to its minimal moderation amid increasing censorship elsewhere.

Following January 6, Twitter and Facebook also banned Trump himself and tens of thousands of his supporters, accusing them of promoting “harmful QAnon-associated content” and “stop-the-steal” conspiracies. These were not bots or foreign operatives, but real Americans who were denied the right of talking in certain public settings because of their contrarian views. This kind of widespread silencing of speech had likely never happened to Americans in the entire history of the nation—or at least to such a large number of Americans. Since personal customization is inherent to social media, these bans and the subsequent massive “moderation” reached each affected user individually, not just as part of a social group but with a jarring, personalized touch.

With Parler dismantled and the right banned from major platforms, conservative users scattered across smaller networks like MeWe, Gab, Rumble and Truth Social, launched by Trump in February 2022. As progressive views dominated both legacy and social media, conservative voices were fragmented and marginalized. Not only was nearly half of the population sidelined, but the manner in which this imbalance of views’ representation was imposed on society also increasingly outraged many, gradually extending beyond just the right, and ultimately paving the way for Trump’s triumphal return in 2024.

Bluesky: From Sobriety to Agitation?

The story of Bluesky—a growing outpost of progressive social media users frustrated with X under Elon Musk—mirrors Parler, but with notable differences. First, Bluesky has shown much stronger growth, expanding from 13 million to 24 million users in November 2024 alone, whereas Parler peaked at 15 million at its best time. Second, Bluesky enjoys a more favorable environment—nobody has called for it to shut down or restrict uploading and hosting. Lastly, while conservatives were driven to Parler by bans and shadow bans, progressives have voluntarily flocked to Bluesky, choosing self-isolation over coexisting with views they don’t like.

In its early stages, lacking monetization and unaffected by bots, Bluesky hosted much more realistic engagement and meaningful discussions compared to X, essentially resembling early Twitter with its socially homogeneous and intelligent user base. But the recent influx of millions of newcomers—now comprising more than half of the pre-election Bluesky’s population—is changing the platform’s culture. Many of these users are driven by outrage toward Musk and Trump, often actively displaying their rejection of unacceptable views and people. Users used to praise Bluesky’s calm and lack of bots or adversaries. However, the influx of newcomers is driving not only engagement but also agitation. This shift threatens to disrupt the platform’s cozy atmosphere even before monetization and bots take effect. Some are already noticing the signs of increasing rage.

Bluesky’s growth may have already reached a threshold at which a network can sustain a conversational ecosystem. Parler never got to prove its sustainability, but Bluesky might offer an interesting experiment. Since Bluesky users’ attitude seems unlikely to escalate into actions like storming the Capitol, the platform can “organically” test the sustainability of a politically secluded social network. The earlier exodus of the Twitterati to Mastodon, in protest against Musk’s takeover, failed—but this time, there’s a chance for them to establish a massive political echo chamber.

The rapid growth of Bluesky has stirred enthusiasm among those involved, but this is seeming to fade. The platform has just reached a milestone of 30 million users, making it a notable social media player, especially considering its self-selected demographic specificity. Yet, it’s still far from the giants like Facebook (3.065 billion monthly users), Instagram (2 billion), TikTok (1.58 billion) and X (611 million). Besides, not all Bluesky users will be active. Some joined out of mere curiosity—perhaps to observe the progressives’ post-election demarche. Others, initially driven by post-election enthusiasm, will cool down. Over time, the number of hardcore users, many former Twitterati, will crystallize. Their activity will serve as a census of digital progressives, revealing the number of those who dominated public discourse over the last 15 years but have now retreated into exile. The broader public will see how many of them were there.

Some argue that splitting social media into political bubbles could reduce polarization. This is unlikely. Users in both echo chambers will continue to stalk, quote and mock each other, indulging their mutual outrage. Besides, isolated from others on Bluesky, the most zealous Twitterati risk engaging in canceling their own—a fallout of political encapsulation. When the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia expelled and executed all the bourgeois, they turned on each other, starting with the most prominent. Among progressives, there will always be someone who slips into centrism or bothsidesism, for example.

Bluesky, a smaller and likely more insular bubble than other social media platforms, also carries higher risks of marginalization. If the former Twitterati continue using their usual rhetoric, it will, of course, be reported to the broader public through X. Bluesky and its users may be marginalized in public perception as a group of “far left,” “alt-left” or whatever pejorative emerges. However, the political split and lack of balance may carry the risk of marginalization for X, too. The potential for marginalization of one or both political sides due to the split into two political online bubbles threatens to deepen polarization even further.

All these projections may be relevant for “normal” conditions, but the coming situation might lack “normalcy.” Donald Trump and his allies are pushing hard to dismantle the previous political and governmental arrangements, while the alliance of bureaucrats, progressives and the media resists. Trump’s relationships with both his foes and allies are likely to generate high volatility. For example, a rift between Trump and Musk could profoundly shake the political landscape. There are also other disruptions that could critically affect the system, such as judicial or economic backlashes to Trump’s abrupt actions. In such a scenario, the former Twitterati might regain power. Bluesky could see a stronger future if Trump’s presidency is overly turbulent or faces major setbacks.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

Since the Anglosphere is (1) deeply rooted in alphabetic literacy, which (2) eventually led it to originate digital media, digital reversal hits the West hardest. (According to McLuhan, reversal happens when a form peaks.) On the other hand, cultures with strong oral residue (1-2 generations of mass literacy or less) suffer from digital reversal from literacy to digital orality to a much lesser degree, as they have less to “lose” - to reverse.

According to a widely publicized study, “The Anglosphere is increasingly miserable. The World Happiness Report shows it diverging from the rest of the world.” The original report is here.

Many have hurried to connect it to the Smartphone Theory of Everything (the term coined by NYU professor Arpit Gupta in 2025). Derek Thompson has just published “Is the Smartphone Theory of Everything Wrong? A Comprehensive Investigation,” where he ranks the 10 most popular claims about phones into categories of strongest, mixed, and weaker evidence. Comprehensive indeed.

Derek Thompson

Is the Smartphone Theory of Everything Wrong? A Comprehensive Investigation

This is an expanded and revised version of an essay that originally ran in The Argument, an online magazine where I am a contributing writer…

Read more

13 days ago · 56 likes · 3 comments · Derek Thompson

I want to add my 2 cents, which I believe explains what is behind and beyond the Smartphone Theory of Everything. I analyze technological or technologically related turmoil hitting the West the hardest through McLuhan’s concept of reversal: any medium or technology, when reaching its extreme, full potential, or limits, reverses its effects to their opposites. Like cars: they enhance mobility, but when there are too many cars, mobility reverses into gridlock. Too many signals reverse into noise, and so on.

Humankind now experiences the digital reversal, because with digital media not only our communication but all our interactions have reached their limit of speed—instantaneity. They have become instant. Never before has human “outer” interaction with the environment been faster than impulses in our nerves and neurons. This is the precondition for a global reversal—the digital reversal.

And cultures with stronger alphabetic literacy—the Anglosphere—HAVE TO suffer from digital reversal the most.

Here is a short chapter from my 2025 The Digital Reversal.

The totality and selectivity of the digital reversal

Some say the internet’s impact is exaggerated. Many people still live in physical reality. That may be true for older generations: part of their lives—or at least childhood—was predigital. We digital migrants know the alternative and can resort to it, though it’s getting harder.

Early digital adopters remember the internet with strong Gutenberg residues: text-based, catalog-organized (like a table of contents). For younger generations—called digital natives for a reason—the touchscreen became the first and dominant environmental interface.

To people, the world is what the interface makes of it. Digital natives experience the world as a “natural” flow—through video games, messengers, and newsfeeds, with occasional references to websites for scattered data. All are immersive interfaces of digital orality.

If this experience dominates early ages—when speech, thinking, and social skills are formed—the whole sensory-cognitive circuitry gets wired for digital orality. As parents often use devices to bribe kids and buy themselves some child-free time, the digital subdues kids’ brains.

The old triad “family–school–street” became “family–school–internet,” then “family–internet–internet”; and now, for many, it’s flipping into “internet–internet–internet.” The only social patterns these kids know are shaped online. A fully digital generation is almost here.

Regardless of one’s generational belonging or media habits, society has already pivoted to digital. Even those maintaining an offline–online balance engage with a society structured by digital media. Lenin was right: “It’s impossible to live in society and be free from society.”[1]

For digital youth specifically, digital orality is not a reversal. It’s their original and natural sensory-cognitive condition. But the digital reversal is a cultural phenomenon that changes the entire society. Some drive it, others are driven into it—but everyone is involved.

***

Reversal happens when a form peaks. That’s why the digital reversal started with educated elites: young professionals in media, tech, academia, and the broader knowledge economy—the apogee of print culture. (Young, because they pioneered digital media and became the vanguard.)

It may sound counterintuitive, but Trump and his supporters weren’t the source of the ongoing reversals. Even more counterintuitive: Trumpism and conservative ressentiment belong to the old world of print literacy, not digital orality—despite their many oral features.

The trick is that conservative ressentiment was a residue of orality within literacy. Trump was always an oralist within literacy: as a TV personality and by nature, he represented oral residue in a literate world—this type belongs to literacy, as strange as it may seem.

Even in literate culture, most people retain oral residues. Universal education gave them the uniformity of the world and the supremacy of absolute truth, shaped by books (the Bible, textbook). So, their everyday orality is framed by literacy. Orality runs strong in many of us.

People embodying oral residue in literate culture are less vulnerable to digital reversal—they don’t have much to reverse. They feel the loss of literate order, and this loss fuels nostalgia and resentment. But behaviorally, they blend easily into digital orality: oral to oral.

On the contrary, young progressive intellectuals, the finest product of the Western alphabetic-print capitalism, have become the engine of digital reversal. True to the nature of reversal, the former vanguard of literacy reverses into its opposite—the vanguard of digital orality.

***

Under the pressure of digital media, the masses have not changed as much as the educated class has—over just a decade. The educated class was the most advanced in alphabetic literacy—so the digital reversal impacted them the most.

For example, the reversal from objective to relative truth affected academia incomparably more than politicians or the general public. Politicians and regular folks were always flexible with truth—oral residues have always been strong among them.

Now, people who were less committed to literacy no longer feel “ashamed” of their essentially oralist behavior. Digital orality has unleashed their “organic” oral residues, once the reversal of society from literacy had been executed and legitimized by the educated.

So, however paradoxical, the conservative ressentiment is a backlash of 20th-century literacy’s oral residue against 21st-century digital orality pushed by the progressive-educated class that gained cultural and political power during the Digital Rush.

But the conservative backlash cannot return things to a “normal,” balanced past. As any reversal is a product of extremes, it never returns anything to previous conditions. Instead, it amplified the divide between competing tribes shaped by residual orality and digital orality.

In general, digital reversal drives digital and residual orality into peculiar historical and geopolitical twists. That’s why, for example, the Western campus and anti-Western radicalism align (though rather virtually). They share patterns of orality.

***

Environmental detachment and the objectivation of nature, both driven by the alphabet,[2] shaped the West’s advantage: excellence in appropriation. After reaching its limit, appropriation reversed into self-deprivation. “Each civilization has its own methods of suicide,” said Innis.[3]

Non-alphabetic cultures, even those that developed long traditions of writing with some degree of abstraction, kept their writing ideographic. They preserved a significant power of ecological, analog thinking—still connected to the environmental immersion typical of orality.

In cultures that never suffered alphabetic detachment from the environment, digital reversal is less of a shock than it is for the West. For societies without centuries of print culture, it’s not even a reversal—just a transition from one oral state to another, now digital.

Digital media emerged in the West because coding was a distant but direct descendant of the alphabet. Any successful medium, however, becomes the asset of all humankind, regardless of its place of origin—be it the chariot, ironware, or printing.

Since the West is (1) deeply rooted in alphabetic literacy, which (2) eventually led to digital media, digital reversal hits the West hardest. But that’s just the beginning. From there, through the role of the West, the effects of digital reversal will spread to all humankind.

Anticipating questions about Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands, which are seemingly less affected by anxiety, according to the 2026 World Happiness Report, despite being alphabetic cultures with a long tradition of literacy (especially the Netherlands), I would think of several mitigating factors. These cultures did not actually reach the peak of literacy—coding, the source of digital media and the precursor of digital reversal. Due to their size, they have also preserved a high degree of communal life, which signals strong oral residue. Also, the factor of happiness (the anxiety of reversal) is only one and rather a superficial manifestation of the digital reversal; other digital reversals (political, epistemological, gender) are likely manifested there, too.

The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution was published in 2025. The future of the book is the blurb, said Marshall McLuhan. As the future arrives, this short book is written in tweets—each paragraph under 280 characters, 1,295 in total, which makes it a reversal of the treatise, the first tweetise in history. Structured in thread-chapters, the book explores and explains what media evolution has done to us.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] Lenin, Vladimir. (1905). “Party Organization and Party Literature.”

[2] I covered the affordances of the alphabet in: Mir, Andrey. (2024). Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

[3] Innis, Harold. (1950). “Industrialism and cultural values.” In: The Bias of Communication. (2008). P. 132.

This chapter follows “The features of orality: Environmental immersion—experiencing the world live” in Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

In 1938, a small fire broke out in the stands of the Paris National Velodrome during a sports event. The panicking crowd rushed to the only exit. The situation was on the verge of becoming deadly. Luckily, there were two psychologists in the crowd who began to loudly chant: “Ne-pousse-pas! Ne-pousse-pas!” (“Do not push! Do not push!”). The rhythm was picked up by those around them, spread like a wave, and synchronized the crowd’s chaotic movement. The panic transformed into a coordinated action. The energy of coordinated efforts helped people safely leave the arena.[1]

The call not to push sounded reasonable; however, the crowd was not so much reasoned with as it resonated with the rhythmic chanting. The content of the chant suggested a strategy, but the rhythmic chanting turned it into collective will and made everybody comply. The rhythmic chanting was the medium of the message that induced cooperative behavior and likely saved lives.

Rhythm serves as the metronome of collectivity ingrained in humans as collective animals, physiologically. Synchronization through rhythm is physiologically reinforced by the feeling of being part of a larger organism, by the sensation of multiplied strength in unity. Using rhythm, one can organize any number of people, even without knowing their language; if you create the right rhythm, they will join in.[2]

We humans evolved not only through interactions with the environment but also, first and foremost, through interactions with each other. Others were the most crucial element of our environment, either beneficial or threatening. This is why environmental immersion also implies collective involvement: an individual cannot not be engaged with others. In an oral society, collective involvement is as total as environmental immersion itself.

Synchronization is a precondition of a collective’s cooperation, and rhythm is its most ancient and efficient medium. But the members of the collective also had to emotionally tune into cohabitation. For this, the series of oral acts people displayed to each other had to be gestural, emotional, loud, salient, excessive in all aspects, and engaging in every possible way, something McLuhan called “empathic involvement.”[3] For tribal cohesion to occur, everyone needs to be prominently present and signal their readiness for connection and inclusion. Orality made people loudly and saliently exposed to each other for the sake of coordination and synchronization. Being an extravert is an organic condition of orality.

By filling shared spaces with the acoustic bubble of their self-exhibition, an oral individual asserts their level of integration into the collective, which also becomes a claim to status in the hierarchy. Those who are better “seen” and “sensed” by the collective can demand greater social benefits. Individuals who are self-absorbed will likely lose in the competition for status and social benefits. That is why an oral individual carries the cloud of their acoustic space with them like a smell, so that everyone around can get involved or be repelled. Loud and overtly affective speech may be considered ill-mannered in a literate culture, but in orality it is a survival strategy.

Empathic involvement can be seen as harmony: the community harmonizes its life through the total mutual exposure of its members. This harmonization comes at the cost of the total absence of privacy. In orality, one cannot keep one’s life to oneself. It is always shared, exposed to others, and intertwined with the lives of others. You’ll never walk alone. Individuals are involved in the exchange of obtrusive phatic signals (social grooming and requests for affirmation). Intimacy, in whatever sense of the concept, is likely impossible in an oral culture; intimacy is a side effect of literacy. The oral community would be a nightmare for an introvert. For a literate and self-absorbed person, just as for an electrician, insulation is better than grounding. It’s quite possible that introverts are a by-product of literacy, too.

Some features of orality persist in our everyday interpersonal communication, though they are hard to recognize. For example, the phatic function of speech serves to establish and maintain social relations. When we meet a neighbor in the elevator, we chat about what a rainy day it is outside. The conversation conveys no useful information for either participant; both have just been outside and have identical information about the weather. The meaning of the exchange is not to share information but to reinforce our mutual status as neighbors and thus maintain tribal unity. Linguists assume that phatic interactions may comprise up to 30% of everyday conversations. The only purpose of these interactions is social grooming and establishing mutual status in the social hierarchy, and through them, ensuring collective coherence.

Small talk is inherently intrusive—we must show interest in someone’s daily life. Contemporary urban culture imposes significant restrictions on such intrusiveness: you cannot ask a neighbor about their relationship with their spouse after hearing some noise from their apartment. You cannot ask a coworker why he or she looks so pale today. Weather small talk is the safest. In an oral community, in a small village, there are no such restrictions. Everything will be asked and expected to be answered, driven by the survival strategy of “empathic involvement.”

Under the conditions of orality, small talk was not actually small. It was of Homeric proportions and included vocal performance and pantomime. But there was also something atypical for the contemporary phatic exchanges of literate minds. The exchange of information about the weather, recent hunts, family scandals, and other personal affairs held real meaning in primary orality. These exchanges were the news media of the oral era. News has a peculiar quality—it becomes important as long as you follow it. Continuous news consumption fosters the habit of following the news: in an oral society, gossiping was an imperative that kept the tribe together, just as the Habermasian public sphere helped to maintain modern society.

And there was more to it. The rapport created by phatic exchange served to tune up the collective mechanism of memorization. This effect of the phatic function is best explained in contrast to literacy. We can easily memorize or communicate information in writing, no rapport with our pen and paper, computer, or smartphone is required. We still need to configure writing tools in a certain way, but this is more a matter of technical customization. We do not need to get them to act in unison with us by imparting emotional and mental tones. Now imagine that the only medium for communication and memorization is not paper or a smartphone but another person. The only way to succeed in communication and memorization is to trigger that person’s response, achieve rapport, and incite their contribution to collective coherence. Most communicative effort has to be spent on tuning them in. The excessively affective speech of orality included efforts to achieve collective rapport and cohesion for coordination and memorization.

Writing, and then printing, allowed for collective coordination on a scale unimaginable in orality. Electronic media did as well. However, while writing and print coordinated people by co-opting them individually into shared ideas, radio and television coordinated people through shared emotions in a semblance of the tribal acoustic space—through “empathic involvement.”

Social media deepened this reversal toward the emotional engagement of everybody with the collective. In McLuhan’s words, spoken in 1967, 50 years before social media,

Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.[4]

The exposure of everyone to everyone on social media also serves as a request for others to resonate and acknowledge each user’s existence and rightness. This ongoing mutual exposure and constant communication requests make social media even more akin to the village than the global village of the TV era, when people were emotionally engaged with collective issues but at least did not expose themselves. Social media enabled this: imagine every TV viewer displaying their reaction to what they see on the TV screen and expecting appreciation of those reactions from others.

In the movie This Is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is the Massage, made in 1967, McLuhan sounds as if he is describing the social media of the 2020s:

The Global Village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged and poking his nose in everybody else’s business. The Global Village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony – you have extreme concerns with everybody else’s business and are much involved in everybody else’s life... It doesn’t necessarily mean harmony, peace and quiet, but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else’s affairs.[5]

According to McLuhan, such relations emerge when “the spaces and times are pulled out from between people” by electronic media and people are exposed—“get close”—to each other. We can clearly see here the pattern of reversal from literacy to orality by electronic media and now digital media. They achieve this by removing the literacy-induced detachment of individuals from the environment and from each other. As a result, “everybody becomes totally involved in everybody.” [6]

This piece continues the topic of “The features of orality: Environmental immersion—experiencing the world live” in Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] The story is recounted by Akop Nazaretyan in his 2001 book Psychology of Spontaneous Mass Behavior. Nazaretyan was the author of the principle of Techno-Humanitarian Balance; see: Nazaretyan, Akop (2017). “Mega-history and the twenty-first century Singularity puzzle.” Social Evolution & History, Volume 16, Number 1, March 2017. Interestingly, as an expert in crowd control and the political psychology of the masses, Nazaretyan worked for the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in the 1970s and trained revolutionary cadres for anti-capitalist resistance in the Third World. When visiting guerrillas in Latin America, “Comandante Akopo”, aside from his ideological work, also gathered a great deal of ethnographic material for his later universal evolutionary theory, which somewhat resembles Teilhard de Chardin’s theory of mega-evolution. See Akop Nazaretyan’s profile on the Social Studies website.

[2] In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan referred to radio as “the tribal drum,” implying its ability to audially, immersively synchronize nations into tribes of imperial scale. See: McLuhan, Marshall (1994 [1964]). Understanding Media, p. 297. He underscored radio’s crucial role in Hitler’s regime (ibid., p. 300). By forming tribal unity on an unprecedented scale, radio indeed created all three major empires of the 20th century: the Communist, the Nazi, and the consumerist ones.

[3] McLuhan, Marshall. (1962). The Guttenberg Galaxy, p. 39.

[4] McLuhan, Marshall, and Fiore, Quentin. (1967). The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, p. 24.

[5] An excerpt from the movie: This Is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is the Massage. (1967). Directed by Guy Fraumeni and Ernest Pintoff. 17:00.

[6] McLuhan, as quoted in: Chrystall, Andrew. (2015). “After the Global Village.” First published in The Canadian Journal of Media Studies, 2011, 9 (1).

Popular perception sees orality and literacy as spoken and written forms of communication. But that’s only part of the picture, rather superficial. The essential distinction between orality and literacy lies in cognitive structures: it’s not listening vs. reading, it’s more about situational immersion vs. detachment. Excerpts from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

In his 2017 Media Ecology, Lance Strate shares a neat observation from Max Frisch’s 1959 novel Homo Faber: “Technology is the art of never having to experience the world.”[1] Strate writes:

Whatever comes between us and our world, that is, whatever mediates between us and our world, becomes our world. Our mediations are what we know. They are all we know. They become our environment.[2]

If media mediate the world, then the less we use media, the more of the world we sense. Conversely, when we are fully immersed in media, we sense no world at all. This seems to be the endpoint of media evolution: when we completely merge with our media, they will become our only “natural” environment. At that point, media will lose their mediating function. The user, media, and environment will become one.

But that’s the “end.” At the beginning of media evolution, a human being was fully immersed in the world, with no mediation, like all other living creatures. The Promethean gift of fire and tools started mediation (and media evolution), shielding humans from nature—but still keeping us within nature.

The rule “the less we use media, the more of the world we sense” has a corollary. Since media extend humans, the less we use media, the less extended we are and the smaller our world is. When considering the farthest-reaching tools, such as arrows or other thrown weapons, an oral person’s reach is roughly a sphere with a radius of 50–60 meters. Vision extends perception to hundreds of meters, and so does hearing. The exact distances can be debated, but the pattern is clear: an oral person’s experience of the world is physically limited by how far the senses can reach or the body can act, even when they are extended by tools. In orality, a person is immersed in the babble of immediate experience, limited by physical reach.

Speech, without a doubt, can extend individual experience beyond physical reach. But for speech to extend our perception of the world, others are required. Oral experience, extended beyond personal reach, is a product of collective effort. The world reached through speech is the world of the tribe, not of the individual.

As a consequence, an oral person does not endeavor to judge beyond personal or tribal experience, that is, beyond experience lived through, individually or collectively. This was also confirmed by Alexander Luria in his Central Asian study. Luria asked illiterate participants to complete a syllogism: “In the far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the far North. What color are the bears in Novaya Zemlya?” The typical answers were, “I don’t know, I have never seen them,” or “You need to ask those who were there. Or the elders, they might know.”[3]

Interestingly, when the syllogism was offered to a 45-year-old foreman of a collective farm who had just learned to read, he answered: “To go by your words, they should all be white.” [4] As Walter Ong highlights in analyzing this story, having only recently become familiar with the literate way of thinking, this person still refers to the researcher’s description (“to go by your words”). [5] He does not take responsibility for a speculative statement that has no basis in his experience. Nevertheless, he appears to be capable of completing the syllogism.

Illiterate people, or rather people of primary orality, were not practically interested in what lay beyond their reach. They were not capable of deriving such knowledge from speculation (syllogism). Why would they want to do that? For this reason, unlike literate individuals, they refrained from making statements about things they had not personally experienced.

Environmental immersion also has a rigid temporal dimension. All beings immersed in the environment are confined to the eternal “now.” Orality is always about the “now,” while literacy is about the “not now.” Living in the “now” leaves no room for reflection. Orality places the individual within events, within the world of the “here and now,” while literacy allows anyone to bring any time and any place into a written, induced reality.

While analyzing TV replays used in news or sports broadcasts, McLuhan comes to a conclusion about the opposition between experience and meaning. The TV replay allows us to extract meaning from experience without actually experiencing it. “In fact, such is the nature of experience that it is almost inevitable that we do miss the meaning,” concludes McLuhan.

Sports referees now rely on replays to make decisions about what just happened. In this way, according to McLuhan, the instant replay exposes “the difference between cognition and recognition.” [6] Living in the moment and being immersed in the “here and now” obstructs the very possibility of recognition. A disruptive media intervention in the natural flow of time is needed—an arrest of time, a rewind, and a replay of an event—to recognize what is happening. This is what recording media enabled, first with writing and later with TV: they replay reality, extending it in time and giving the mind time for reflection.

The limitation of the world by spatial personal reach and temporal “eternal now” is a fundamental condition of situational immersion. This condition was one of the features of primary orality that have been retrieved by digital orality.

Digital media extend users’ reach tremendously, allowing us to communicate across the globe instantly. Yet they place the user in a bubble of immediate digital experience, similar to what Eli Pariser described as a “filter bubble.”[7] The bubble of digital experience is not physical but social, and its range is limited not by the senses or thrown implements, but by algorithms and the user’s social graph. However, the effect is similar: it is shaped in the form of audile-tactile space; it is simultaneous in a 360-degree sphere and strictly limited by situational “practical needs,” now shaped by digital media.

However, surprisingly (or not), the literate aptitude for speculative statements with no support in personal experience has survived digitalization. Physical distance is no longer an obstacle to “awareness” of polar bears. Media deliver images of them—media induce the faked, simulated experience of seeing polar bears. Since social media encourage personal engagement, users can, or rather even have to, make judgments about events or processes of which they have no real personal experience whatsoever. But people have an enriched and extended—media-induced—experience of all sorts of polar bears that they have encountered on TV and now on the internet.

That is why personal but non-experiential judgment has outlived literacy and flourishes on the internet. Such judgment remains speculative but is no longer syllogistic; social media judgment represents an oral-literate hybrid of speculation and immersion: speculation based on media-induced “lived experience.”

The environmental immersion of orality also means immersion into the most important part of the environment—the collective…

Read next: “The features of orality: collective involvement—you’ll never walk alone.”

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

See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition, p. 110.

[2] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition, p. 110.

[3] Luria, Alexander. (1976). Cognitive Development, p. 108. See also: Mir, Andrey. (2022). “Media-ecological engineering of the Soviets.” Explorations in Media Ecology, Volume 21, Issue 2-3, Oct 2022, p. 150.

[4] Luria, Alexander. (1976). Cognitive Development, p. 114.

[5] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 52.

[6] McLuhan, Marshall. (1974). “At the moment of Sputnik the planet became a global theater in which there are no spectators but only actors,” p. 57.

[7] Pariser, Eli. (2011). The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think.

I have a confession to make. In my entire life, I have listened to only two podcasts from start to finish, and only because both were about my books. I could say it’s because I work with written words and because I am an intellectual and yada yada. Well, yes, I am, but it’s not the reason.

The actual reason is the passive aggression of acoustic space: acoustic space is time-locked—you can’t control it.

Hold on, aren’t ideas in writing also locked in a structure designed by the author that you cannot control, and if you miss, you miss? Yes, you can skim the text while reading, but you can also speed up or even fast-forward a podcast while listening. So why is it that reading gives you a sense of more time control than listening?

Self-paced and auto-paced media consumption

This characteristic of reading was observed by my friend and fellow media ecologist Corey Anton. This is how I described his finding in Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror:

“The capacity of literacy to facilitate theorizing relies, in no small part, on the “atemporality” of reading, as Corey Anton calls it. According to him, “books allow one to read at one’s own pace.” The content of reading is “seamlessly worked into the flow of consciousness” because “the text does not ‘go on’ without us.”[1] Anton suggests distinguishing between self-paced technologies, such as books, and auto-paced technologies, such as podcasts, films, and videos. He writes:

Communication technologies that run at a pre-set rate, which flow as it were and thereby demand that consciousness attend to them as they are flowing, are more psychically constraining and confining than self-paced technologies.[2]

The temporal constraints imposed by electronic formats that simulate orality immerse the user in an external environment, controlled by the source of broadcasting. Anton even implies that this submission to auto-paced technologies can explain the frustration often accompanying the consumption of electronic and digital media:

Could it be that there is an undiagnosed stress – an oppression of the mind – that comes from having to spend time within simulated environments that unfold at a rate not endemic to one’s own consciousness? Could it be that people have unconsciously trained their minds to obediently align to of auto-paced technologies and now experience a vague but pervasive sense of moving to other people’s rhythms instead of their own?[3]

Reading, on the contrary, adjusts the pace of information intake to the reader’s personal thinking rather than to someone else’s broadcast, thus integrating the content of what is read “seamlessly” into the inner space of the reader’s thought. Among all media, only books possess this quality, as Anton highlights. Reading is morphologically compatible with thinking.”

Yesterday, X/Twitter turned into a Respublika Literaria, for a moment

Something unusual happened on X/Twitter recently. Of course, somewhere deep or on the margins, it always hosts highbrow self-expression. But it is usually suppressed by rage bait, which is favored by algorithms due to its higher potential for engagement. But look at what the algorithms highlighted on March 18, at least for me:

It happened amid the debate on introspection, inspired by Marc Andreessen and, unrelatedly, by Colin Wright’s dismissal of podcasting and praise of writing and reading. Here are some excerpts:

Colin Wright:

Podcasting lets people speak vaguely about a topic while creating the impression of thorough treatment. I’ve often pushed back on something a podcaster posted on X, only to be told by their fans that it was “thoroughly addressed” somewhere in a three-hour podcast.

But when I listen to the relevant section, it doesn’t deliver. It’s often just more vagueness and dancing around the issue, avoiding making direct, falsifiable claims they can be held to.

There’s a reason many podcasters don’t write articles about the topics they discuss. Writing forces them to make coherent arguments without fluff. It forces them to connect every link between premise and conclusion. It forces them to cite sources accurately instead of speaking vaguely off the cuff.

It’s also easier to be misled by smooth-talking podcasters…

Podcasts are great. But anyone presenting themselves as a public intellectual and making serious, high-stakes claims about the world needs to do more than talk. They need to write. (Read the full manifesto, it’s great.)

Colin Wright also adds in the comment:

I’m a much better writer than I am a speaker. I prefer writing, especially because much of what I write about—critiques of gender ideology and a defense of the sex binary—requires a lot of precision. I write legal definitions, expert testimony, and scientific descriptions.

If I don’t say something perfectly, I pay a big price. In fact, all of society pays a price if I mess up! I actually welcome this arrangement. I want to be held to a high standard. I want my ideas to be attacked, because my goal is truth and clarity.

Three more arguments for reading books over listening to podcasts

Besides depth and thorough elaboration, there are three more solid arguments in favor of reading: quotability, cascading novelty building, and depersonalization.

1. Quotability.

Audio is not quotable. You can repeat something you heard and comment on it, but you cannot incorporate it into your own reasoning in a way that allows it to become a detachable thought that can also be used in the next rounds of knowledge building.

An oral idea can be reiterated to build upon only once, at most twice. An oral “Aristotle said that Plato said that Socrates said” retains historical value but loses the capacity for intellectual integration in the next rounds of abstract thinking. It just does not add up...

Written quotes can be layered, reused, and built upon. A quote can be cited again, combined with others, and integrated into ongoing arguments. In speech, a quote is usually used once in context and does not easily carry forward into further chains of reasoning. In writing, quotes compound; oral quotation serves only for a single reference.

2. The compulsion of novelty

Another restriction on adding up: orality is designed for repeating. Oral sharing was a collective mechanism of memorization, so in repeating what you heard, value comes from verbatim reproduction: the closer you repeat to the original, the better for collective memory.

A slight change and situational adjustment of what was heard are acceptable; they may even be deemed wordplay and valued for that, like a joke adjusted for a situation. But the reference must be recognized; it is valued for referencing back to the known, not for challenging it. Generally, oral repetition favors preservation and therefore precision. It serves to conserve, not to develop.

In the meantime, as the Soviet philosopher Michael Petrov noted, writing compels one to argue with what was written before. Orality is agonistic “in person,” so to speak, but literacy is intrinsically agonistic in ideas. In his 1966 Pirates of the Aegean and Individuality (a year before the term media ecology was even introduced by Postman), Petrov writes:

Writing, as a universal individual skill – as literacy – is inherently a blind creative force that mobilizes the entire population of the literates, whether they want it or not, for theoretical creation. Literacy sets up minds in mutual non-conformity and mismatching, forbids them to repeat each other, and requires each literate mind to produce a new text, a new opinion on any subject that has already been touched upon by the opinions of others. The transition of writing into literacy signifies an automatic transition to a new psychological disposition, a disposition toward seeking novelty, for each literate mind now has to identify the pre-existed attitudes towards reality, reject them as a-priory false or incomplete, and elaborate its own views completing “truth” – meaning constantly being in a creative mode of analysis of the present and a synthesis of the new.

In this way emerges private ownership over thought and its products: theoretical relationships with the world. This private ownership over thought monopolizes the right of truth-seeking and becomes an aggressive-creative mental force incapable of being satisfied by any existing theoretical system, constantly suspecting that truth – ultimate certainty – lies somewhere beyond the established system of relationships, beyond ritual. A never-ending ancient discord, the Hobbesian “war of all against all,” bursts out, in which the only victor is social memory which absorbs all newly arriving texts, meaning new theories of the world, unless it is trimmed or fenced by a Great Wall of censorship or policing measures such as the canonization of texts into a sacred scripture.

So, orality forces people to affirm or challenge others’ standing to maintain tribal hierarchy (better hierarchy means better survival), while in literacy, quotation drives intellectual challenge to dismiss or build upon. The precision of repetition in literacy is provided by default, by words recorded verbatim, so the cognitive energy is freed for something else, for reorganizing and revising. In literacy, the status game shifts into the space of ideas.

Podcasts cannot do this. Paradoxically, podcasts strengthen conformity within a tribe, while writing provokes nonconformity, even within a tribe. Aristotle had to be the first philosopher to write in prose to say, “Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.” He dared to disagree with his elder and mentor, something unheard of in orality. This is what writing did to him.

The medium is the message. As Postman wrote, you cannot do philosophy in smoke signals, nor can you do it on television. And podcasts, we can add. However smart ideas are presented in podcasts, the focus will be on the interplay of status and personalities. And here comes the third argument.

3. Personalization in podcasting and depersonalization in writing

When commenting on what you hear or see, you are more likely to respond to performance than to content, as oral delivery naturally (hormonally) makes people react to whether they like or dislike those they listen to. It is extremely hard to overcome this social, “hormonal,” tribal pull and comprehend the real content behind the delivery. Orality is inherently relational, as opposed to writing, which is rational because it separates the Knower from the Known (Havelock) and largely disregards the personality of Foucault or Chomsky or whoever…

To demonstrate how personality influences the perception of content in writing versus speech, consider two quotes:

“We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.”

“It’s time to rebuild our infrastructure and create millions of jobs, rebuilding roads, bridges, schools, and transforming our transportation and energy sectors.”

They are identical in meaning, aren’t they? And they will likely be received as closely aligned by a reader. But what if a reader were to learn, especially beforehand, that the first one is said by Trump and the second by Biden? Now, if these two ideas were heard from Trump and Biden, would they be perceived as similar (as they truly are)? With extreme effort, maybe, but largely no.

Only writing can clear the idea from personality.

(* Of course, for an attentive reader, “second to none” exposes Trump even in writing. It is excessive bragging, a feature of orality, the force that is strong with this one.)

Why podcasts grow while reading shrinks

There is a popular idea that podcasts replace book reading. It’s not entirely accurate: podcasts take time in the daily media diet that would be unlikely to be spent on books anyway. Podcasts are listened to while driving, doing chores, cooking, and so on, when hands are busy and cannot grab a device with a screen, but compulsive digital consumption dictates consuming something anyway, and this something becomes radio, music, or podcasts.

I do not drive a lot, but when driving somewhere, I listen to the radio—to open myself up to the world; and when driving back home, I listen to an old playlist that I almost never revise—to immerse myself back into introspection. Perhaps, if I make an effort and set up podcast listening in the car, I would listen to some; I would likely choose Douglas Rushkoff. I have never listened to his podcast Team Human, but I have heard him in person many times and like his wit and his artistic delivery very much. So I think sometimes, and then: hold on! Okay, I hear an interesting thought from Doug, and then what? How do I put it down in writing to be used afterward? I am driving.

I read to write; to write, I read. And so does everyone who supported Colin Wright in his podcast dismissal and praise of reading. It’s a very peculiar demographic, a contemporary Respublika Literaria. And that’s only partly bragging: in terms of orality vs literacy, Respublika Literaria was characterized by semi-literacy: the number of writers was roughly equal to the number of readers, meaning they wrote for each other. This was a condition that accompanied the invention of the printing press and was boosted by it into the scientific and religious revolutions. Now this fading gleam, this last convulsion of Respublika Literaria, is closing the Gutenberg Parenthesis, as we all write largely for each other, and it’s not us who make podcasts successful.

Podcasts, by the way, can be more or less literate. To convert a podcast or video from an auto-paced medium to a self-paced one, with more user control over time, timestamps help.Essentially, timestamps are a concession of orality to literacy; they apply a table of contents to audio or video. Very helpful! (To at least skim what’s inside.)

But setting up timestamps and video chapters takes time, and that is not what this medium favors. Its strength is in the speed of production. Let’s say an expert is equally good at speaking and writing, but it takes him or her a day to write down and refine content that takes only an hour to tell in a podcast. In an environment where the speed of interaction defines everything else, the choice in terms of production is obvious. Go talk and be everywhere.

The ease of production opened the niche to billions of novices, creating a huge input for selection. The size of the input has provided the quality of the output; the best podcasters outperform leading TV shows on cable networks in terms of both audience reach and the relevance of agenda setting.

I wonder, though, if those millions of listeners really listen to their favorite podcasts from start to finish. If so, these must be enormous single spans of media consumption, like one or two hours of uninterrupted media consumption per user, comparable perhaps only to gaming. Where do people find time for it?

See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] Anton, Corey. (2023). “Reading good books, further defended,” p. 122.

An influential French media think tank, Upgrade Media, published an interview in which we discussed how the digital reversal has impacted the public sphere in general and journalism in particular. Where is mass communication heading? Will journalism survive? Interview by David Sallinen, CEO and founder of Upgrade Media and initiator of the Pioneer Media project.

David Sallinen: You frame your work around the idea that media, when pushed to their full potential, reverse their effects. What makes you think we are now reaching that point with digital media, and not just experiencing another phase of disruption?

Andrey Mir: According to McLuhan, any media or technology reverse their effects when they reach their extreme forms, their full potential. A simple example: cars increase our mobility, but when the use of cars reaches its limits, mobility reverses into gridlock. The overuse of signals reverses into noise, and so on.

There is at least one characteristic of contemporary media that has reached its extreme form and cannot advance further. It is the speed of human interaction. With electricity, we reached the instantaneity of communication. In digital media, we have reached the instantaneity of not just communication but of any kind of interaction. So digital mediation is the fastest possible, because it is instant. You simply cannot go faster.

DS: You argue that digital media have reached “full potential” through speed, scale, and ubiquity. Which of these factors matters most in triggering reversal, and why do incremental reforms fail once this threshold is crossed?

AM: Speed of interaction is fundamental. Instant interaction with each other and the environment removes the reaction delay that made us humans millions of years ago. That delay in reflexes was what speech fit into, and this separated us from nature. Now the instant speed of our interactions reverses the biological foundation of our ecology and submerges us back into the environment—but now into the digital environment, and as digital beings.

Additionally, as digital media have reached all demographics and enveloped nearly all our activity, we are reaching another limit: total social reactivity. The reversals that follow change our entire social existence. That is why we feel as if so many things—the entire world—not just change but flip upside down.

DS: You describe today’s environment as a reversal of literacy into “digital orality”. How does this shift change the way authority, truth, and credibility are established compared to the print-based era?

AM: Because of digital devices, typing has become instant and interactional. Typing has reversed text into texting. Texting is a hybrid of talking and writing: just as talking, it is instant, conversational, and behavioral, just as writing, it leaves records and delivers our expressions beyond immediate conversation.

Spoken language created the cognitive and cultural conditions of orality. Writing created literacy. Now texting is creating a hybrid cultural and mental condition that I call “digital orality.”

Why is it “orality” in “digital orality”? What is “oral” in it? No, it’s not about vocal performance. And it’s not because of videos or podcasts. The essential difference between orality and literacy was not talking versus writing, but immersion versus detachment. And so is digital orality: it is immersive, interactional, behavioral. But it immerses us in digital reality—not in the physical world, as orality did. That’s why it’s digital orality. And that’s why it’s a hybrid: on devices, we remain physically detached, as in literacy, but behaviorally immersed, as in orality.

The immersive character of digital orality retrieves many features of primary, tribal orality. One of them is the perception of truth. Before writing, there was no objective truth. Truth is an abstraction created by writing, because writing detached our mind from behavior—from situational thinking. There is simply no need for objective truth when people are immersed in situations. In orality, truth was negotiated and defined by situational outcomes: what worked—that was truth.

Since digital media are immersive, they restore those conditions. Literate, fixed truth is vanishing. The subjective, practical, contextual take on truth is starting to prevail. Instant connectivity turns the subjective truths of many into a collective truth that replaces the abstract, ideal principle of absolute truth. This means that truths are now defined by referendums of likes within digital tribes.

Similar reversals are happening to many abstract universalities once established by literacy and print. The global digital reversal consists of many specific reversals in all areas of human life, starting with epistemology and ending with politics or even relationships between the sexes.

DS: You define postjournalism as a shift from supplying news to validating news people already encounter elsewhere. At what point did this become the dominant function of mainstream media, and what made that shift unavoidable?

AM: This shift was tied to the demographics of social media proliferation. In the beginning of the 2010s, advertising had already fled to the internet, and the media needed to find new revenue. They went digital and started chasing digital audiences – remember the motto of the time: “Digital First!”? People in the media thought that we would just switch the carrier from paper to digital, and that’s it – we would use amazing internet technologies to sell news and ads even better.

Not so fast. In this new digital environment, a new medium emerged that delivered news and advertising not just better, but personally. Unlike old media, digital platforms can customize the delivery of content to each user personally, and do so at the scale of hundreds of millions. Personalization for millions – old media do not have, and cannot have, such capacity.

But media managers did not know this yet. So news media rushed onto digital, set up paywalls, and started courting digital audiences. And this is where a very important demographic factor came into play, one that is often overlooked. Who were digital audiences at the time? The first digital adopters were young, educated, urban, and therefore progressive. Seeking their attention, the media embraced their values – and sidelined the rest of the population. Why bother with coverage for those who cannot digitally subscribe?

As a result, news coverage in the early 2010s changed profoundly, now representing almost exclusively progressive views of the world. Even the language of news changed dramatically – frequency analysis shows that the terminology of wokeism, previously confined to narrow circles of academic activism, skyrocketed in journalism precisely in the early 2010s, the period that I call the Digital Rush.

But digital progressives were truly progressive and did not consume news from old media. Digital paywalls, the hottest trend in 2011–2012, stalled or failed. Digital subscriptions did not work.

In the meantime, older, less urban, less educated, and less progressive demographics, abandoned by the mainstream media, adopted social media and gained the ability to inform each other, just as their younger progressive predecessors had done five years earlier. This is how the wave of conservative resentment rose, leading to Brexit, Trump, AfD, Marine Le Pen, and so on.

And this was the moment when the alignment of many newsrooms with progressives started bringing some earnings – through what I call postjournalism.

In the digital era, people switched to receiving their news from newsfeeds. But when something disturbing happens, they need to validate the news in an authoritative public source, not just on friends’ Twitter feeds. They need to make sure that they are on the same page with public opinion, that the news is terrible for society at large. So it’s not about the news, it’s about its assessment and confirmation. The media got the prompt and switched from news supply to news validation. This is how, sometime between 2016 and 2018, the reversal to postjournalism was completed.

For the largest media outlets, very few though, validating disturbing news and channeling outrage became a good business model. The rise of right-wing populism generously supplied such triggering news to be outraged over. In the US, it led to the so-called Trump Bump in the media. I believe a similar trend was observed in other Western countries: the curve of subscriptions, flat in 2011–2015, went noticeably up in 2016–2018.

DS: – In a feed-driven environment where “news finds you”, discovery becomes cheap. Why does validation become the scarce resource and what does that scarcity do to editorial standards and newsroom culture?

AM: The question about scarcity is right on target. In digital, scarcity has reversed into abundance. Due to the instant speed of interaction, the digital is an environment of abundance. Discovery is cheap indeed.

What happens to competition for attention if news is abundant and its discovery is cheap? The competition moves from digging up and refining information to intensity of expression. Naturally, this leads to spiraling polarization and tribalization, aligning well with the conditions of digital orality. The worst part is that the media have to compete in intensity and outrage with social media and on social media.

What does it do to newsroom culture? Journalists always looked for triggering news to catch the public’s attention and sell the story. But now the competition in intensity reverses the value of a story from fact to drama, to the point that drama no longer needs real facts. As a result, only those facts matter that produce outrage.

This is where fake news comes from: emotional perception overshadows the factual matter and makes it insignificant. What was once a feature of postmodernism has become the essence of postjournalism.

DS: You’ve recently clarified that polarization was never a sustainable business strategy, but an effect of media-ecological and economic conditions. What do people still misunderstand when they interpret polarization primarily as an editorial choice?

AM: Yes, polarization is not some evil plot by politically captured newsrooms. This is a media effect, a byproduct of media ecological change (the internet) and the business reversal from plentiful advertising revenue to desperately seeking digital subscriptions.

Polarization is a far more serious issue than fake news or disinformation. Fake news has a built-in immunity mechanism: the more people encounter fake news, the less they trust online information. The decline of trust is an immune response. So the more fake news there is, the less it really affects people. Except causing anxiety.

Polarization does not have such a built-in safety mechanism. The digital environment favors intensity, and the more intensity is produced, the more it creates outrage, and the more intense the next round must be. Unlike fake news, polarization is a self-driving digital phenomenon.

The competition in intensity propels marginals and repels moderates, weakening the political and cultural center, until the moderates abandon the public debate completely, leaving the scene to the most agitated individuals with extreme views.

DS: You suggest we are moving from “news avoidance” to something deeper: engagement avoidance. What signals tell you that audiences are not just disengaging from news, but from mediated outrage itself?

AM: Bragging, status contest, drama, intensity, animosity, and intrusive empathic engagement are natural features of tribal orality – I explored this theme in Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror. But in the physical world, they were restrained. One could not challenge those with greater strength or status, nor could one challenge distant others. Both animosity and empathy were limited to immediate circles. None of these limitations apply in the digital. Drama, empathy, rage, and animosity expand unconstrained by time and space, across social strata without hesitation. This drives people crazy – or at least many of us.

News avoidance has reached a historic high: about 40% of people worldwide are not just uninterested – they actively avoid news. It seems the trend also extends to engagement avoidance, judging by rapidly dropping engagement on social media. Nearly all platforms have reported declining engagement over the last few years. Many people now resort to silent scrolling – they log in but avoid exposing themselves to rage and animosity.

By the way, this rise in avoidance has effectively ended the Trump bump – the outrage-driven subscription growth in 2016-2018. Recent studies cited by Greg Piechota of INMA show that outrage may still drive attention, but not subscriptions.

The other factor driving social media disengagement is AI. It’s claiming more of our daily media diet, taking time from other forms of media consumption – especially from social media. Chatting with AI is more comfortable than getting dragged into online outrage. AI has become another option to escape from social media insanity.

Alas, disengagement does not fix the issue of polarization. Who is more likely to avoid engagement on social media? Those who psychologically suffer from rage and animosity, most likely people with moderate views and habits. Those who thrive on rage stay engaged and propel polarization further.

DS: You often draw parallels between postjournalism and generative AI. In what sense is AI not a break from the current media regime, but its logical extension?

AM: Generative AI emerged, roughly, from the same technological-demographic source as postjournalism: a media development aligned with digital progressives. Journalism sought to depict the world-as-it-is; postjournalism pictures the world-as-it-should-be. And so does Generative AI – it gently curates the picture of the world for us into what it should be, not what it is.

There are multiple technical, ideological, and even juridical reasons behind it. AI designers are afraid of all sorts of liability, political and legal. Imagine, so to speak, a “laissez-faire” AI that learns from all the good and bad that humans produce. Due to the instant speed of interaction, digital reality is more exposed to impulsive, not considerate, human reactions. From the digital version of humankind, this “laissez-faire” AI will absorb rage more readily than reason. In experiments where a self-learning language model was left to its own devices, it copied bad human reactions faster and turned into Hitler within two days or so. So curating AI learning from humans makes sense. But curating by whom?

Anyway, protecting AI from the worst in humans reverses into conditions where AI guides users on what is right and wrong. A child of humankind, AI tends to treat users as gullible children, preferring political correctness and empathic accommodation to subject matter. It’s essentially the stance of postjournalism.

It’s a kind of paradox: Asimov thought that the machine could operate only with data and would be incapable of moral judgment, but we now have generative AI that engages in unsolicited moral considerations. But again, this may not be a bad thing: unsupervised learning would make AI susceptible to copying the worst in human nature, because our digital orality – what AI is exposed to – favors impulsiveness, rage, and tribalism.

But that does not mean that AI is just another mass medium after TV and the internet. We are still at its early stage. Any new medium, when it is at its early stage, tends to serve the function of an older medium. Only then does it unleash its own capacities. When AI matures, it may trigger the final digital reversal – the reversal of the carrier of consciousness from biological to non-biological, an event also known as the Singularity.

DS: If digital reversal has already occurred, what aspects of journalism and media authority do you believe will never return, regardless of better technology, better ethics, or better business models?

AM: We are losing cognitive delay, sustainable inner focus, rational reasoning, linearity and sequentiality of thinking. These were all sensory-cognitive characteristics fostered by writing. They defined how the literate mind and society worked. Digital orality is immersive, impulsive, multitasking; it favors reflexes over reflection, has a short attention span, and reacts to intensity better than to subject matter. This is our new media ecology, driven by digital media. This – digital – human condition is unlikely to vanish, at least not until mind upload or a global catastrophe, whichever comes first.

On a very practical level, journalism is approaching its historical extinction. Printing begot the era of modernity, with representative democracy as its political form and industrial capitalism as its economic form. Journalism worked for both and was part of that era. The era is gone, and so is journalism, living through its likely last decade. It appears journalism rested not on information but on a monopoly over information. The monopoly is gone, and no organizational improvement can undo it.

DS: If institutions have lost their monopoly on truth, discovery, and even validation, what meaningful role can media organizations still play, beyond nostalgia for their former authority?

AM: I am not the right person to seek optimistic suggestions from on this matter. I myself left journalism 15 years ago. I value the skills and mindset that journalism fosters, but as an industry, mass media are largely gone. There may be five to ten years of convulsions ahead. The situation is aggravated by the fact that this local professional decline coincides with the global reversal of human jobs caused by AI. It’s hard to isolate the task of preserving journalism when AI reshuffles or takes away the entire field of human content production.

So just do what you must and prepare for the worst, so that if something better happens, it will come as a pleasant surprise. It is clear that there are no viable market-based strategies for journalism anymore. Those rare cases that are referred as “success” relate either to very specific niches, like The Wall Street Journal, or to auxiliary businesses, like The New York Times, which built platform-sized distribution and sells bundles to supplement news.

Among other adjacent businesses, I think fact-checking has some business potential, if it manages to distance itself from the political enterprise of fighting disinformation. The digital environment is full of uncertainty, so rapid, story-based fact-checking may become a postjournalistic, in a good sense, product. Other interesting directions for newsrooms include ranking anything that can be ranked and organizing events. Basically any extension of the former media brand would do. But I suspect most media managers have already explored these ideas many times over.

DS: Much of the industry still talks about “rebuilding trust”. From your perspective, is trust an obsolete objective and if so, what mechanisms now structure legitimacy, adherence, or belief?

AM: I think institutional trust in mass media is gone, but the reputation of a brand still has value – and actually will always have, especially under the conditions of digital orality. Tribal society does not have developed institutions, but it keeps names and statuses in high regard. So using an old brand for new reputational applications is actually a good strategy.

DS: You’ve said the industry is largely gone, but that professional media skills are more valuable than ever. If journalism is no longer an institution but a set of competencies, what do individuals (journalists, editors, media leaders) need to become in order to remain relevant?

AM: Yes, the media industry is gone, but media skills are in higher demand than ever. In an environment where everyone becomes media, everyone else is still learning, but we journalists already know how to do it. I am very grateful for my 20 years as a journalist and editor. I have thought about this a lot and found that journalism provides two extremely valuable sets of skills for whatever you do in digital: content management and attention management. It is the ability to find relevant information, cut and structure it into a story, package it into a multimedia product, target the right audience, and deliver the product in a timely manner and with proper follow-ups. Every journalist and editor knows what this is about, but this knowledge is far from common outside the guild. These skills are highly transferable to nearly every digital activity. This is a good thing – it’s the severance package we receive from good old journalism.

Interview by David Sallinen, Upgrade Media.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

On March 9, 2026, The New York Times launched the quiz “Who’s a better writer: AI or humans?” Readers were invited to choose the better-written sample in five pairs of texts across different genres. One day later, after 86,000 people had taken the quiz, the result was impressive—or confusing, depending on where you stand on AI–human replacement. 54% preferred the samples written by AI.

The result, of course, raises a troubling question about the future of journalism. However much digital folklore mocks AI and its ability to write or create, we miss what really matters. It is not the current results that matter, but the current dynamics. Judge the potential of AI writing or creativity not by the results achieved in the three years since it appeared, but by the dynamics AI has shown in such a short time.

Indeed, ChatGPT has been in mass use for just over three years, and other LLMs for even less. In that short time, they have taken over a large share of content and creative production that used to be done by humans, and now users are beginning to prefer it—and this is in The New York Times, of all places. Imagine the awkward takeaway: “54% of readers in The New York Times preferred AI-written texts to human-written.”

However awkward or imperfect AI content may sometimes seem, content production is moving in that direction. And now users are signaling that they do not mind and sometimes even prefer AI.

But the alarm comes a bit late. In fact, the takeover began quietly more than a decade ago. The first contest between a bio-journalist and a robo-journalist happened in 2015, when NPR’s Scott Horsley competed with the WordSmith algorithm to write a financial report. That was seven years before ChatGPT. In 2014, WordSmith alone, one of the two leading writing algorithms at the time, produced 1 billion news stories—likely more than all human journalists combined that year. In 2013, probably the first university study comparing robo-journalistic and bio-journalistic writing was conducted in Sweden—and the results were inconclusive. That was the time to worry about AI taking over journalism, not now.

I wrote about robo-journalists in 2016, covering real stories of how writing algorithms were put to work in newsrooms. For some reason, they were little known even in the industry, despite already being widely used at the time.

Awakened now by the obvious threat from AI, many still dismiss the trend with outdated claims that AI cannot produce real creativity. But that is not the point. The point is that AI works faster and cheaper, has no complaints or unions, and readers do not seem to mind. If AI can deliver comparable quality at a much lower cost, why keep humans? Except for the love of humans, of course. That’s what The New York Times quiz unwillingly unveiled.

Anyway, I think the NYT AI–human quiz is a good hook to revisit the true and much longer story of robo-journalism that dates back long before ChatGPT. So here is my 2016 essay, “Robo-journalism: the third threat,” which traces the early competition between human journalists and proto-AI in journalism (slightly abridged[1]).

Robo-journalism: the third threat

The first contest between cyber journalists and bio-journalists ended in a tie.—Three threats to journalism.—News stories about earthquakes and tectonic shifts.—Generative journalism.—Two arguments about “robots’ incapability.”—Road map for robot journalism.—Forecasts and suggestions. (Published in 2016, revised).

The first contest between cyber journalists and bio-journalists ended in a tie

In May 2015, NPR White House correspondent and former business journalist Scott Horsley took on the WordSmith algorithm created by Automated Insights. “We wanted to know: How would NPR’s best stack up against the machine?” NPR wrote. Since NPR is a radio network, a human reporter working there is expected to be very good at fast reporting. Under the rules of the test, both competitors waited for Denny’s, the restaurant chain, to release its earnings report. Scott seemed to have an advantage—he was a Denny’s regular. He even had a regular waitress there, Genevieve, who knew his favorite order: Moons Over My Hammy. It didn’t help… though that depends on how you judge the results.

The robot completed the task in two minutes. It took Scott Horsley a bit more than seven minutes to finish. NPR published both news pieces to offer readers a sort of journalistic “Turing test” (again, it was 2015, 11 years before The New York Times quiz and 7 years before ChatGPT). Can you identify which piece was written by a robot and which one by a human?

The piece on the left was written by the robot. It contains more numbers and uses a drier style. Scott, by contrast, added some unnecessary detail to his version of the financial report, for example with this sentence: “the growth in sales suggests consumers are opening their pocketbooks for pancakes, eggs and hash browns.”

Technically, the robot’s vocabulary is larger because it contains the whole language. But it has to rely on the most relevant and conventional words, the ones with high frequency, and that eventually makes its style dry. In addition, its vocabulary is restricted by its specialized task. For example, a robot would not use culinary or sports terms like “hash browns” or “grand slam” in a financial report. Why would it? That lies outside the program.

Humans behave in the exact opposite way in this regard. A human writer is not limited by word frequency or strict relevance and can freely use rare or colorful words. This broadens the context and makes the writing more vivid. An original, unconventional word use is also what makes a writer’s style. Human writers even feel compelled to use unusual words, because self-expression is part of our social “program.” Robots, by contrast, have no need for originality when producing a financial report.

“But that could change,” NPR suggests. If the owner feeds WordSmith more varied NPR stories and adjusts the algorithm to diversify its vocabulary, the program’s wording could become broader. These things can be modified with ease, unlike humans who require lengthy, if even achievable, learning to write.

So who won the competition? The robot wrote faster and in a more businesslike style. Scott Horsley sounded more “human” (no surprise), but he was slower. The audience for this writing is people in the financial industry. Is the lyrical aside about wallets and pancakes useful to them? As long as the readers are humans, not other robots, it might be.

Ultimately, it’s a tie. Although two minutes versus seven may be critical for radio and for the financial news market.

Academics also set up a competition between a horse and a steam locomotive. Christer Clerwall, a media and communications professor from Karlstad, Sweden, asked 46 students to read two reports. One was written by a robot and the other by a human. The human story was shortened to match the length of the robot’s. The robot story was lightly edited by a human so that its headline, lead, and opening paragraphs followed the usual editorial style. The students then evaluated the stories on several criteria, including objectivity, trust, accuracy, boringness, interest, clarity, pleasure to read, usefulness, and coherence. (The research was conducted before 2014, the year of publication.)

The results showed that each story did better in different categories. The human story scored higher on “well-written,” “pleasant to read,” and similar qualities. The robot story scored higher on “objectivity,” “clear description,” “accuracy,” and others. So once again, humans and robots ended in a tie.

But the most important thing the Swedish study revealed is that the differences between the average text written by a human and one produced by a cyber-journalist may be negligible. This is a crucial point when assessing the future, and even the present, of robot journalism. Critics often say that robots cannot write better than humans. But that frames the issue the wrong way. “Maybe it doesn’t have to be better—how about ‘a good enough story’?” Professor Clerwall told Wired.

Three threats to journalism

The internet emancipated authorship. Millions of people now inform each other about everything happening in the world. The surprising part is that, driven by enthusiasm, many do it for free. Yes, the internet contains a lot of rubbish, but people usually consume information that fits their interests. Content on the Web is not filtered before publication; it is filtered afterward, when it spreads, through the Viral Editor. As a result, legacy media lose their monopoly on shaping the news agenda. This is not only about the decline of newspapers, which is inevitable. The internet threatens old media not just because of the shift from print to digital, but also because the audience itself has become involved in news production and delivery.

Another threat to traditional journalism comes from content marketing. Corporations have also become authors, which means they rely less and less on traditional media as intermediaries. Companies can communicate directly. Brands have become media in their own right.

Content created by amateur writers, or bloggers, improves through cooperation (this is the Viral Editor). Corporations, by contrast, improve their media output through competition for public attention. In this media “arms race,” corporations attract professionals from media companies, adopt innovations, and most importantly shift from direct advertising to social agendas. Brands need an audience; advertising only pushes the audience away, while content marketing can gather it. Although the wider public hardly notices these processes, corporate media activity threatens traditional media just as much as the blogosphere does.

The blogosphere and corporate journalism are still human activities. But legacy journalism now faces a third threat, a soulless and inhuman one. Traditional media lose readers to the blogosphere and advertising to corporations, and their problems do not end there. People in the media may also lose their jobs to writing algorithms, this third threat.

Tired of competing with everything on the Internet, and now also threatened by algorithms, editors perceive this new threat with anxiety or sometimes rejection. Those more familiar with the issue usually say, “Okay, someday robots will write sports news, financial analysis, and weather reports. But they are incapable of anything else.”

That is the wrong take. Robots are already writing news about weather, sports, and finance. On a large scale, this is no longer about the future. The answer to the question of whether robots are capable of anything else is “yes.”

News stories about earthquakes and tectonic shift

This story went down in journalism history. On March 17, 2014, at 6:25 in the morning, journalist and programmer Ken Schwencke of The Los Angeles Times was jolted awake by an earth tremor. He rushed to his computer, where a news story written by the Quakebot algorithm was already waiting for him in the publishing system. Ken skimmed the report and pressed “Publish.” Thus, The Los Angeles Times became the first media outlet to report the earthquake, three minutes after the tremor. The robo-journalist outran its human colleagues.

The next Los Angeles Times earthquake report was published an hour after the second tremor. It is signed by Schwencke, but at the end there is a note: “This post was created by an algorithm written by the author.”

The Quakebot algorithm, written by Ken Schwencke, has been around for two years. It is connected to the U.S. Geological Survey and takes data directly from it: the location, time, and magnitude of an earthquake. It compares this information with records of previous earthquakes in the area and determines the event’s “historic significance.” The data is then placed into a standard template, and the news report is ready. The robot uploads it to the publishing system and sends a note to the editor. The report is far from Pulitzer-worthy, but it allows an editor to publish the news within minutes after it happens. Needless to say, earthquakes are major news in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times website even has a special “Earthquakes” section, which is filled by a trainee robot correspondent.

Another robot handles the crime reports at The Los Angeles Times. It has been producing the Homicide Report since 2007. When a coroner adds information to the database about a violent death, the robot collects the available data, places the case on a map, categorizes it by race, gender, cause of death, police involvement, and other factors, and publishes a report online. If the case seems important, a human journalist later gathers more information and writes a longer news story. If not, the robot’s report is all that appears on the website.

Media critics point out that crime coverage has changed with the arrival of robot reporters. In the past, journalists covered only the murders that seemed most significant. Now robots cover every murder. Looking at data on all homicides shows how they are distributed across different districts on a map, both overall and in categories such as gender and race. These visualized statistics produce “secondary” content that human reporting usually misses. The maps of homicides created by robots also have additional value, for example for the real estate market.

It is worth adding that a criminal reporting robot covers a territory of 10 million people – it’s comparable to the population of Sweden or Portugal. Certainly, a bio-journalist can’t make instant statistical calculations on such a scale.

In such cases, robots help journalists collect facts and do the first processing of data. Journalists then have more time for creative work. This is true. A crime-reporting robot does not really write, and neither does Quakebot, which simply uses preset phrases and templates. They are useful helpers for humans, nothing more.

The cases of financial and sports reporting are a bit more complicated.

Generative journalism

Here is a news story written by the WordSmith algorithm and published by the Associated Press (you don’t have to read it, just look at the quality of reporting).

This news report was produced in less than a second. The robot gathered the facts, compared the relevant market data, and generated a fairly detailed and coherent text.

Even more striking is that in 2014 the Associated Press published 3,000 WordSmith stories in a single quarter—about ten times more than AP journalists used to produce in the same period. By the way, robots are already entering the financial news market in some of the world’s leading media outlets. Another company, Narrative Science, which we might call a leader in generative journalism, provides its Quill robot service to Forbes.

Let’s look at sports reporting to see what is happening there. Here is a fragment of a kids’ baseball league game report written by the Stats Monkey algorithm, a system created by Narrative Science:

Friona fell 10-8 to Boys Ranch in five innings on Monday at Friona despite racking up seven hits and eight runs. Friona was led by a flawless day at the dish by Hunter Sundre, who went 2-2 against Boys Ranch pitching. Sundre singled in the third inning and tripled in the fourth inning … Friona piled up the steals, swiping eight bags in all …

Stats Monkey has a distinctive feature: it uses baseball slang. But that’s not all its benefits. During youth games, parents enter the results into a special iPhone app while the game is still in progress. Fans—the players’ relatives—receive a detailed report about the game even before the teams finish shaking hands on the field. Needless to say, for these fans such reports matter far more than a Super Cup report.

But there is even more to it. In 2011, an algorithm wrote 400,000 reports for the children’s league. In 2012, it wrote 1.5 million. For comparison, that year there were 35,000 journalists in the US. They would not be willing to cover Little League games, no matter how much they were offered. This reveals another aspect of robot journalism: algorithms can cover areas of journalism that human reporters skip because of “low newsworthiness.”

By the way

The digitalization of sports itself opens new possibilities for robot sports reporting. As Steven Levy wrote back in 2012 in an article for Wired, sports leagues now track every inch of the field and every player with cameras and sensors. Computers collect all kinds of data, such as ball speed, throw distance, leg movement, altitude, and other telemetry. A well-trained algorithm can detect when a pitcher’s throw weakens, or when a player starts leaning left before the batter makes a winning hit. Is this information important? Yes, but a human reporter would rarely notice it. Traditional sports journalism cannot capture this kind of detail, just as traditional crime reporting lacks interactive maps showing the distribution and density of crimes.

In other words, robots have already surpassed human reporters in data journalism, in speed, and in the scale of news coverage. But can they beat humans in writing style?

Two arguments for “robots’ inability”

The main argument against the future dominance of robots is that machines cannot create. Two ideas usually follow from this: a robot cannot invent like a human, and a robot cannot write like a human. Let’s look at them.

1) A robot can’t invent

YES. Serendipity is a human experience. A person can stumble upon an accidental invention or discovery for no clear reason—like when an apple falling on someone’s head, or a sudden brainwave. There is also the phenomenon of “eureka,” a moment of sudden insight that is hard to explain in logical terms. For this reason, many people believe that creative breakthroughs will always remain a human prerogative. Humans can act proactively and thrive on creativity, eureka moments, and serendipity. A robot’s actions, by contrast, are predetermined by an algorithm, at least as we understand them today.

That is why skeptics say robots will not be able, for example, to recognize the potential for a sensation in an event among many similar ones, as a human editor does. Moreover, a robot will not be able to decide to exaggerate an ordinary event into a sensation, as editors often do. How do you decide what to hype and what not? An editor knows; a robot doesn’t.

BUT. What if robots can do something humans can’t? They can cross-analyze enormous amounts of data and detect correlations. For example, analyzing consumer and political data might show that owners of red cars tended to vote for Bush. A human would struggle to find and explain such links. In a world of Big Data, cause-and-effect explanations are often unnecessary. Robots can discover striking correlations that matter for marketing, politics, and media. The world is full of them, but human journalists are often unable to see them.

What if an algorithm’s ability to come up with correlations compensates for and even replaces human serendipity, such as eureka moments and even the sense of humor? What if correlation is sometimes even more telling than causation? Facts derived from data may be as interesting and irrational as the outcomes of human creativity.

2) Robots don’t have a sense of style

YES. It’s true, robots don’t aim to write in a beautiful manner, and even if they had such a goal, what would be defined as «beauty»? What is it?

BUT. If beauty cannot be calculated, human reactions to it can. Humans themselves can serve as a measure of beauty for robots. Imagine that all texts and people’s reactions to them—likes, shares, comments, click-throughs—are collected in a robot journalist’s database. Even today, algorithms can identify which headlines, topics, and keywords attract attention by observing people’s reactions. Editors guess, robots know. Human crowd A/B testing replaces the algorithm’s own sense of style.

Now imagine that, with the help of biometrics—eye tracking already allows this—robots could analyze people’s physiological responses to specific words, idioms, epithets, syntactic constructions, and images. Such technologies are becoming more and more affordable; the only question is the amount of data and the processing speed.

Such systems can automatically produce more attractive headlines and texts. But new problems may arise: 1) attractiveness could turn into white noise; 2) the chase for human reactions could make generative journalism degenerative. Still, as long as this is a transitional period, the analysis of human reactions can compensate for robots’ lack of senses.

In other words, for every argument about what robots can’t do, there is an equally strong argument about what humans can’t do. In this competition of capabilities, robots and humans end up in a tie.

The competition has just begun, yet it is already a tie.

Roadmap for robot journalism

Based on what is already known about robot content creators, one can imagine how they are going to conquer the world. Or occupy the journalistic profession, for a start. Here are the key points of how robot journalism is going to operate in the future.

1) Big Data. Algorithms are designed to manage vast amounts of data. Their ability to detect correlations may in some ways replace human creativity. Many of the best human minds are now working on this problem—and they care little about saving journalism.

“If there is a free press, journalists are no longer in charge of it. Engineers who rarely think about journalism or cultural impact or democratic responsibility are making decisions every day that shape how news is created and disseminated,” said Emily Bell, professor at the Columbia Journalism School, in a speech whose title speaks for itself, “Silicon Valley and Journalism: Make up or Break up?”

2) Audience reaction analysis. By monitoring, collecting, and analyzing journalistic texts (syntax, vocabulary) together with people’s reactions to them, algorithms can calculate which texts and which features generate more likes, reads, reposts, and comments.

Some niches may remain where only humans do journalism. These will become a kind of sanctuary for bio-columnists. But on an industry scale, such niches that robots cannot cover will make little difference. Moreover, the share of human-made journalism will keep shrinking as the overall volume of robot-produced content continues to grow.

3) Biometrics. Once robots gain access to human nonverbal reactions and body language, they will be able to calculate subtle reactions instantly. Imagine someone reading a story about Trump: the touchscreen detects sweaty hands, the webcam registers dilated pupils, the microphone picks up faster breathing. This technology can replace an editor’s intuition. Applied to millions of people, it could also become the largest lie detector in history.

Technology is replacing humans with algorithms at a high speed. Why should they stop developing? It’s an open highway, leading to artificial intelligence, by the way.

Forecasts and suggestions

Co-founder and CTO of Narrative Science Kristian Hammond believes that 90% of news could be written by computers by 2030. Hammond also said that a computer could write a story worthy of a Pulitzer Prize by 2017.

I would add that we are entering both a quantitative and a qualitative competition with our cyber-colleagues. In the quantitative contest, bio-journalists have already lost. In the qualitative one, we may lose within five to seven years. (Can’t help but add with hindsight: ChatGPT arrived exactly seven years after that prediction. While a Pulitzer Prize for a robo-journalist hasn’t happened yet. - AM from 2026.)

It is interesting that in the early stage of the transition from human journalism to robot journalism, editors themselves will be the ones to kill the profession. Newsrooms have to produce as much content as possible to generate traffic. Journalists often have no time for serious topics; instead, they are pushed to produce more and more stories for the website. It becomes motion for motion’s sake. Journalism theorist Dean Starkman called this effect the “hamsterization of journalism,” or the Hamster Wheel. Hamsterization reduces the time journalists spend on each story so they can produce more stories—“do more with less.”

Let’s imagine that a good article, which means good journalism, can attract thousands of readers. But what if a thousand stories produced in the same time bring a hundred readers each? When traffic is king, editors don’t need the best journalists; they need fast journalists. They need churn, they need churnalists. Who will an editor choose—a prima donna journalist with rising salary demands and three stories a month, or a faultless algorithm with ever-lower maintenance costs and three stories a minute?

The Associated Press bought the WordSmith service not because the algorithm writes better than humans do. The reason is simple: it writes more and faster. Debates about text quality miss the point. Robots will conquer newsrooms not for belletristic reasons, but for economic and, paradoxically, “professional” ones.

Thus, the robots’ advent is unstoppable. Under these conditions, the most beneficial strategy for newsrooms is to be among the first at the beginning of robotization and among the last at the end of it. Using algorithms to generate texts can be an effective PR strategy today, attractive to both audiences and investors. But when algorithms flood the market, a rare human voice will be in demand amid the robots’ metallic squeak.

In this sense, strange as it may sound, human journalism may become especially valued in the final stage of media robotization. Moreover, editorial mistakes may become particularly valued and even attractive. That will last at least until robots learn to simulate editorial mistakes too.

In 2014, Wordsmith, one of the two most powerful news-writing algorithms, wrote and published one billion news stories. That may be as many as, or even more than, all human journalists produced that year. Part of that billion simply expanded the overall volume of content. The rest already replaced work that would otherwise have been done by humans.

The market is going to demand more and more. Nothing can stop robots from writing as much as they are required to, since their only limit is the volume that people can read. Even this limit will disappear once the readers are also robots.

See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] The extended version of this essay was also published in 2018: “AI to Bypass Creativity. Will Robots Replace Journalists? (The Answer Is “Yes”).” Information, 2018, 9(7), 183.

The total engagement and status competition are accompanied in orality by an agonistic mentality, as Walter Ong calls it. He writes: “Many, if not all, oral or residually oral cultures strike literates as extraordinarily agonistic in their verbal performance and indeed in their lifestyle.”[1] An excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

Ong illustrates agonistic mentality through a story:

In oral cultures a request for information is commonly interpreted interactively, as agonistic, and, instead of being really answered, is frequently parried. An illuminating story is told of a visitor in County Cork, Ireland, an especially oral region in a country which in every region preserves massive residual orality. The visitor saw a Corkman leaning against the post office. He went up to him, pounded with his hand on the post office wall next to the Corkman’s shoulder, and asked, ‘Is this the post office?’ The Corkman was not taken in. He looked at his questioner quietly and with great concern: ‘’Twouldn’t be a postage stamp you were lookin’ for, would it?’ He treated the enquiry not as a request for information but as something the enquirer was doing to him. So he did something in turn to the enquirer to see what would happen. All natives of Cork, according to the mythology, treat all questions this way. Always answer a question by asking another. Never let down your oral guard.[2]

In a literate culture, knowledge is detached from the person, and it is possible to establish status by possessing better information and sharing or withholding this information. In an oral culture, one establishes their status only through others via either cooperation or rivalry with them. The oral utterance is designed to resonate, to be affective and to be engaging. Oral speech-behaviour is always intrusive. Emotionality, which is needed to convey affect for better cooperation and memorization, additionally intensifies the agonistic nature of speech-behaviour.

Since the function of an utterance in orality is not just to convey a subject matter but also to utilize the listener, everyone constantly decides whether he or she should comply with others’ requests. Should one benefit from subordination to the other or challenge them to maintain their own social status and respective privileges?

The constant request for affirmation by everyone to everyone – the request for your time – creates psychologically quite an aggressive environment. Even compassion and empathy, which are innate in the conditions of total collective exposition, are agonistic and intrusive – they oblige. Accepting a gift, an invitation or hospitality with insufficient enthusiasm may lead enmity and war. This is where the honour system takes its roots. “But you ask without respect, you don’t offer friendship, you didn’t even call me godfather.”

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that everyone stands not just for themselves but also for the good name of their family or kin. Orality created a society regulated by honour, a regulative force opposite to both the concept of law and the concept of conscience (both emerged as effects of writing). If the relational bias of orality fostered loyalty and, to some extent, empathy, then the agonistic mentality fostered hubris, a personal and political trait much fought against by the Greeks as soon as they developed alphabetic literacy, as the Greeks believed that hubris underlies tyranny.

According to Ong, “By keeping knowledge embedded in the human lifeworld, orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle.” Proverbs and riddles are used not just to store knowledge but also for engaging in verbal combat. Bragging about achievements or enduring is obviously a status-seeking speech-behaviour and as such is highly agonistic as well. Friendly or hostile name-calling is a legitimate sport in orality. In the same manner as a true sport, a name-calling contest sometimes substitutes for fighting. Or else, ritualistic insults legitimize real fighting that follows – they create the ground to morally justify escalation and physical altercation.

Ong writes that the name-calling contest is a “standard in oral societies across the world” and has even been given a specific label in linguistics: flyting (or fliting).[3] Contests based on mutual insults were widely practiced on the battlefield or in public speech. After writing, they survived there and spread, though in rather more exquisite forms, in rhetoric, politics, jurisprudence, diplomacy, and beyond. Although Ong may not have witnessed it in his time, competitive name-calling has also found artistic expression in rap battles, a descendant of oral poetry. Grand events in this genre are called “epic rap battles,” as if keeping a reference to primary orality.

On the opposite side of agonistic name-calling or vituperation is, according to Ong, “the fulsome expression of praise which is found everywhere in connection with orality.” [4] From the point of view of literacy, the fulsome praise in oral or residually oral tradition sounds “insincere, flatulent, and comically pretentious,” in Ong’s words. Similar to name-calling, the oral tradition of fulsome praise survived the advent of literacy and holds on in some areas of social activity. Toasts, congratulations, and celebratory speeches are exceedingly praising and bombastic in cultures with strong residual orality. In others, their intensity is significantly reduced by literacy but is still detectable.

Whether it is a song by an African griot or a toast by a tamada (the master of ceremonies) at a Georgian wedding, the praise carries its oral agonistic character anyway. It is still a status contest and a competition of competences.

Marshall McLuhan did not use the term “agonistic mentality,” but he certainly saw it as an effect of retribalization. In a 1977 TV interview, McLuhan dismisses the romantic expectations of the host regarding the Global Village:

McManus: But it seems, Dr. McLuhan, that this tribal world is not friendly.

McLuhan: Oh, no, tribal people… one of their main kinds of sport is a sort of butchering each other. It’s a full-time sport in tribal societies... The closer you get together the more you like each other? No, there is no evidence of that in any situation we’ve heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savagely impassionate with each other.[5]

The retrieval of the agonistic mentality has only intensified in the digital realm. On social media, everyone seeks affirmation from others on a scale unheard of in human history. Not only is the agonistic mentality making a comeback, but it also threatens representative democracy (by amplifying polarization) and people’s mental health.[6] Here is what McLuhan said about these conditions in 1967:

The more you create village conditions, the more discontinuity and division and diversity. The global village absolutely insures maximal disagreement on all points. It never occurred to me that uniformity and tranquility were the properties of the global village. It has more spite and envy. <…> The tribal-global village is far more divisive – full of fighting – than any nationalism ever was. Village is fission, not fusion, in depth all the time.[7]

McLuhan sounded his proximity alert 50 years ago.

Read more about features of primary orality retrieved into digital orality in: Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 43. Conversely, people from oral cultures might perceive those from literate cultures as too pretentiously “nice” and smiley, which could be interpreted as a facade concealing hypocrisy and insincerity.

[2] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 67. The case is told with the reference to: Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1923). “The problem of meaning in primitive languages”, in: C. K. Ogden, and I. A. Richards (eds), The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism.

[3] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 43.

[4] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 44.

[5] Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Mike McManus. (1977). 1:22.

[6] Se: Mir, Andrey. (2022, Winter). “The Medium Is the Menace. Ubiquitous digital media offer potent rewards—but at the price of eroding our sensory and social capacities.” City-Journal.

[7] McLuhan, Marshall. (1997 [1967]). “The Hot and Cool Interview” to Gerald Stearn, p. 57-58.

Explaining the incredible complexity of social, political, cultural, and economic life through the clay tablet or papyrus was sometimes labelled techno-determinism. In turn, techno-determinism was condemned for the alleged reductionism of complex social issues to a single factor. An excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

In ecology, however, a single factor can indeed have deterministic power. The leading global ecological discourse, global warming, is heavily “techno-deterministic” – its determining medium (the “agent of change”) is carbon dioxide, which is excessively released to the atmosphere because of human activity.

The equilibrium in any ecosystem can be disrupted and re-established in a new way by a powerful enough single factor.

In the 1970s, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar ordered one male and four female hippos for his private zoo. By the 2020s, a herd of 140 animals had changed the regional ecosystem. They spoiled lakes and rivers, changed flora and fauna, caused fish to die, ruined fishing, and disrupted the entire habitus of the locals.[1]

From 1995 to 1997, forty-one wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone.[2] Wolves changed the number and behavior of elk and restored the balance of plants. Wolves affected other predators, which led to the restoration and increase of the diversity of birds and rodents. Without wolves, elk suppressed riverside plants, and this drove away beavers. After wolves returned, beavers returned, too, which altered the water system and even the landscape and microclimate. The return of wolves transformed the entire regional ecosystem.[3]

Can the changes in the Yellowstone ecosystem be “reduced” to wolves? Hardly. But wolves have certainly become the determinant of changes. Scientists pointed out that a new equilibrium has been formed in the phenomenon called “trophic cascades,” or how species interact within a food web (i.e., how nature is organized, if one can characterize the near-impossible complexity!).[4] In other words, the wolves caused a cascade ecological effect.

The entire ecosystem can be affected not only by the addition but also by the removal of a single factor.

In India, farmers used to give their livestock diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug that was harmless to farm animals and humans. But the presence of diclofenac in the corpses of farm animals killed 99% of the vulture population. Vultures were a crucial sanitary element in the ecosystem, they served as a natural animal disposal system. The vultures’ metabolism trapped and killed pathogens thriving in carrion, thus preventing the spread of these pathogens. Vultures also suppressed other scavengers who spread diseases. This is particularly important in the conditions of the Hindu religion, in which 80% of the population does not consume cow’s meat and dead cows are left to nature.

After the vultures were almost gone, a huge number of animal carcasses were left to rot. They became a feeding ground for infectious germs and also for feral dogs and rats that spread other diseases, such as rabies. As the vulture population plummeted from 40 million to just 19 thousand, India’s feral dog population increased by at least 5 million, resulting in over 38 million additional dog bites and more than 47,000 extra deaths from rabies.[5] Studies showed that the loss of vultures in some regions raised all-cause human death rates by more than 4%.[6] This is now called the “Indian vulture crisis,” and the country is struggling to restore the vulture population.

In 1958, the communist regime in China announced the Four Pests program aimed at the extermination of rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The “Smash Sparrows Program” led to particularly dramatic consequences. Sparrows were guilty of eating grains, seeds, and fruits, so the Communist Party sentenced them to death to increase agricultural productivity during the so-called Great Leap Forward. Millions of Chinese, especially school pupils and youth, were mobilized to kill birds and destroy their nests. In 1958, in just one day of national anti-sparrow action, 310,000 sparrows were killed in Peking and an estimated 4 million across China, according to the victorious reports of Radio Peking. Sixteen-year-old Yang Seh-mun became a national hero for killing 20,000 sparrows.[7]

The extermination of sparrows disturbed the ecological balance and resulted in surging locust and insect populations that destroyed crops. Along with other governmental policies within the Great Leap Forward, including massive deforestation, the reorganization of farming, and inefficient food redistribution within the planned economy, this led to the Great Chinese Famine, one of the deadliest famines and the largest man-made disaster in human history. The estimated death toll was 15 to 50 million.[8] In some provinces, up to 18% of the population died.

Escobar’s hippos, Yellowstone’s wolves, veterinary diclofenac, and the killing of sparrows were “single factors” that disrupted the ecological equilibrium and altered the ecosystem through the cascade effect. Similar to the domino effect, even a slight disturbance of the balance can release significant forces. These forces belong not to the initial factor or agent but to the masses that come into motion after the triggering factor disturbs the equilibrium. A small domino piece, when pushed in the right place in the system’s equilibrium, can eventually move incomparably larger masses.

The domino effect is mounting but linear. The cascade ecological reaction can also be overlapping (and enlarging because it is overlapping). The next events are affected not just by the previous events but also by the cumulative or reverberating impacts of earlier events. This is called the “ripple effect.” Ripples of different speed and potency can cross, overlap, and turn into rogue waves that reshape ecosystems and civilizations. So, yes, behind a simple media deterministic statement, such as “The wolves changed Yellowstone,” there are complex ecological mechanisms, some hard science, and even some sophisticated math.

In this light, Lance Strate in his 2017 Media Ecology, a must-read textbook in the field, suggests considering “For Want of a Nail,” a rhyme that has been a longstanding part of English folk tradition:

Strate also mentions another variation that includes a message as part of the events: “For want of a rider the message was lost, for want of a message the battle was lost, for want of a battle the kingdom was lost, and all for the want of a horseshoe nail.” He writes:

“For Want of a Nail” tells the story of a series of causal events, each one escalating in importance, in a manner that we might refer to as a snowball effect, or butterfly effect, the idea that small changes can reverberate and grow into much larger ones, especially if they become part of a positive feedback loop.[9]

Further, Strate comes up with a possible explanation of the “reductionist” accusations against media deterministic concepts:

But what happens when we collapse the chain, and express the same idea in a more economical, less poetic, summary fashion, that the loss of a nail caused the loss of a kingdom? This sort of abbreviation results in a statement that strains credulity, that most would consider an exaggeration at best. The same might be said of a statement such as, the stirrup caused feudalism.[10]

Strate quotes Neil Postman (his professor in the 1980s), who repeated after Huxley that we all are “Great Abbreviators.” Strate offers samples of such abbreviations:

We might say that evolution caused humans to stand erect, that gravity causes objects to fall to the ground, and that entropy causes systems to seek equilibrium, statements that are properly understood as a kind of shorthand for more nuanced scientific theory.[11]

McLuhan was, of course, among the greatest abbreviators. He did not hesitate to make statements that cut out boring nuances and jumped right to the key points. Strate quotes some McLuhanisms from The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962):

“The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.”

“Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.”

“The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of cultures, as Harold Innis was the first to show.”

“Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism, and opposition to government as such.”[12]

From this angle, Strate analyzes the role of the stirrup in forming the socio-economic conditions of feudalism in Medieval Europe, as suggested by Lynn White in his 1964 book Medieval Technology and Social Change.[13] In McLuhan’s interpretation, White “explains how the feudal system was a social extension of the stirrup.”[14] To pinpoint the issue, Strate suggests that if he were to make the claim that the “stirrup caused feudalism,” it would come across as incongruous and perhaps even absurd, despite (or because of) its likeness to a scientific formulation. But it might also “perform a heuristic function, leading to further discussion and investigation.”[15]

Of course, there is a chain of more nuanced and overlapping occurrences connecting the stirrup and feudalism. The stirrup allowed a mounted warrior to use heavy weaponry and the power of a galloping horse for attacks. This created a superior battle technique and allowed extended conquest and expanded military gains. But this military technique also required the production of expensive heavy weaponry and armor. The assistance of servants and foot soldiers was also required. They would help the horseman mount the horse, but they would also fight on his flanks, precisely in the manner of modern infantry accompanying a tank on the battlefield. So mounted warriors simultaneously became the captains of these military units.

Therefore, it can well be said that the new combat technique led to new socio-economic relations. Mounted warriors received a well-deserved share of the war gains and, in return, were obliged to maintain their military units. This entailed knighthood and the vassalage system, with respective economic, military, and political relations between the vassals and the sovereign. Knighthood also created the ethics and aesthetics of chivalry, with its poetry, rituals, and even gender roles: chivalry, in French, meant cavalry or horsemanship. And here we have, finally, the complete picture of feudalism.

This is what Postman meant when he said that technological changes are ecological: “I mean ‘ecological’ in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change.”[16]

Within the ecological framework, media determinism is not reductionism. Media determinism is “inductionism.” It represents the inducing—formative, terraforming—power of media. Media determinism is not the order of things but an optic for looking at this order. Rejecting media determinism means declining a goldmine of insights. And vice versa: as soon as you accept the optic of media determinism, your life becomes a captivating ethnographic expedition.

Karl Marx was a latent media determinist. According to him, “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.”[17] On another occasion, in a passage written a century before McLuhan, Marx asked:

Is Achilles possible when powder and shot have been invented? And is the Iliad possible at all when the printing press and even printing machines exist? Is it not inevitable that with the emergence of the press bar the singing and the telling and the muse cease; that is, the conditions necessary for epic poetry disappear?[18]

Vladimir Lenin reworked the media determinism of Marx into media ecological engineering. His famous formula of communism stated: “Communism is the power of the Soviets plus the electrification of the whole country.”[19] As steam engines, according to Marx, brought capitalism, electricity, according to Lenin, should have brought communism. It was not, of course, some “linear” naivety of reductionism. Lenin understood that electricity would favor large industrial enterprises, the cradle of the proletariat, and thus would disturb the small-holding economic structure that suited the agricultural economy based on the peasantry with its small-proprietor consciousness, then the predominant demographic of Russia. The peasantry was receptive to the bourgeois mentality and therefore posed a threat to communism.[20] So electrification was tasked with reshaping the peasant country, much like the wolves in Yellowstone. The ecologists in Yellowstone were ecological engineers, too. For them, wolves were the medium of ecosystem engineering, terraforming (whereas hippos were a medium of entertainment for Escobar, and their reshaping of the ecosystem was an unintended consequence).

Terraforming is the ultimate environmental power of media, whether applied by an ingenious mind or unleashed by itself naturally. New media, when spread widely enough and massively used, transform from an instrument into an environmental force.[21] As soon as people start using a medium, they become a part of the environment created by this medium. The terraforming power of media is not a figure of speech. Humans with their media have physically reshaped the planet and even near space, with both intended and unintended outcomes.

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

See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] See for example: Drost, Philip. (2022, October 25). “Why this doctor is castrating the offspring of Pablo Escobar’s escaped hippos.” CBC.

[2] Smith, Douglas W., et al. (2019, April 25). “Wolf Restoration in Yellowstone: Reintroduction to Recovery.” Series: Yellowstone Science. Volume 24, Issue 1: Celebrating 20 Years of Wolves.

[3] The metaphor of wolves changing an ecosystem was also used by Paolo Granata in his course on media ecology at the University of Toronto. Granata refers to Dennis Cali’s 2017 book Mapping Media Ecology, and Cali in the book refers to an interview with T. David Gordon. The Yellowstone wolves are indeed a compelling example of ecological determinism and a strong response to accusations of “reductionism”.

[4] Smith, Douglas W., et al. (2019, May 16). “The Big Scientific Debate: Trophic Cascades.” Series: Yellowstone Science. Volume 24, Issue 1: Celebrating 20 Years of Wolves.

[5] Burfield, Ian, and Bowden, Chris. (2022, September 28). “South Asian vultures and diclofenac”. Cambridge Core Blog.

[6] Frank, Eyal, and Sudarshan, Anant. (2023, January 21). “How human and ecosystem health are intertwined: Evidence from vulture population collapse in India.” VoxDev.

[7] Time. (1958, May 5). “Red China: Death to Sparrows.”

[8] According to various sources listed in Wikipedia: “Great Chinese Famine”.

[9] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 155.

[10] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 155.

[11] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 154.

[12] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 156-157.

[13] In his 1964 book Medieval Technology and Social Change, Lynn White advanced the theory that feudalism in Europe developed as a result of the introduction of the stirrup to cavalry. The theory spurred the so-called “Great Stirrup Controversy” and many accusations in techno-determinism and reductionism.

[14] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 156.

[15] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 157.

[16] Postman, Neil. (1992). Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, p. 18.

[17] Marx, Karl. (1847). The Poverty of Philosophy. Chapter 2.1, Second Observation, Para 2.

[18] Marx, Karl. (1859). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Introduction, Appendix 1, Section 4.

[19] Lenin, Vladimir. (1920, December 22). “Report on the work of the Council of People’s Commissars.” in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), Vol. XXXI, pp. 513-518.

[20] Mir, Andrey. (2022). “Media-ecological engineering of the Soviets.” Explorations in Media Ecology, Volume 21, Issue 2-3, Oct 2022, p. 143 – 155.

[21] Miroshnichenko, Andrey. (2021). “Media and Responsibility for Their Effects: Instrumental vs. Environmental Views”. Laws, 10, no. 2: 48.

There is a popular belief that Hemingway averaged 10 words per sentence. Studies don’t confirm it – the estimate is closer to 15. He was surely a master of short sentences, but that was a deliberate style. The shortening of speech we see today is not.

Researcher Arjun Panickssery tracked how the average sentence length has plummeted over centuries – from 50 words per sentence for Chaucer and Spenser to 12 wps in the Harry Potter books.

According to Panickssery, this pattern appears everywhere. Newspapers shrank from 35 to 20 words per sentence between 1700 and 2000. Presidential State of the Union addresses dropped from 40 to under 20 wps. Even Warren Buffett’s shareholder letters compressed from 17.4 to 13.4 words per sentence between 1974 and 2013.

Why? Panickssery offers several explanations:

• the shift from reading aloud to silent reading;

• the fact that only the smartest and most educated could read and write in premodern times, naturally producing complex sentences; and

• the rise of journalism with its space limits and punchy style.

The data reveals something important: the shortening of sentences began long before radio, television, or the internet. The shortening of phrasing seems to correlate with the expansion of literacy – suggesting that the underlying cause is the democratization of literacy itself.

The pinnacle of literacy: the semi-literacy of the early modern era

Early writing created craft literacy – a skilled trade of priests and scribes who recorded decrees, taxes, debts, contracts, and so on (see: Media platforms of mind). With rare exceptions of early scholars and authors, writing mostly served bureaucratic functions.

With the growth of scholarship, semi-literacy emerged. Its defining characteristic was that writing expanded beyond recordkeeping into scholarly prose, but the number of readers remained roughly equal to the number of writers. The literati wrote for one another and comprised the audience for one another, as in the Respublica Literaria, the international community of early modern intellectuals.

They didn’t hesitate to construct intricate arguments spanning pages. Not coincidentally, systematic philosophy and speculative thinking flourished during this period. Abstract thinking is tied to writing; before writing, oral people were immersed in concrete situations and did not have a need for abstraction. It seems that abstract thinking fully unfolded precisely in the era of the most complex writing: semi-literacy, when only the most educated wrote and read.

With the rise of printing, literacy became a beneficial social and economic strategy for merchants and craftsmen – the emerging bourgeoisie. Printing was the first industrial enterprise, and profit depended on mass production and consumption, so market forces became an additional driver pulling the masses into literacy.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman noted that between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut reached 89-95 percent – probably the highest in the world. Women’s literacy hit 62 percent, also likely higher than elsewhere. This was, of course, the effect of printing and its derivative, Protestantism, which demanded personal reading of the Bible, pushing literacy into the masses even more. It is no surprise that the US became a rare case of a nation established by writing and in writing – and therefore founded on reason and abstract ideals, the effects of literacy.

Mass literacy as the beginning of literacy’s decline

As literacy spread downward and across the demographic pyramid, the writing–reading privilege of the smartest and most educated was diluted by new demographic arrivals. Literacy grew more diverse and inclusive. Popular literature and the mass media emerged, restricting authors by the limits of space and packaging. Some of the most talented journalists came to define literary style: Twain, Whitman, Hemingway, and others. Journalism taught the reading public that “shorter is better.” Not depth of thought, but marketing and speed of interaction began defining writing styles and sentence length.

The semi-literacy of early modernity unfolded the intellectual potential of selected individuals; the democratization of literacy set out to unfold humankind’s collective intelligence, where the overall speed of exchange is more important than intellectual depth.

But there was a trade-off. The growth of literacy through democratization manifested the first signs of post-literacy. Writing grew less abstract and more interactional, intended to amuse the audience. Written sentences became shorter and terser.

It may well be that writing’s greatest effects – abstract thinking and reasoning – reached their peak when literacy was confined to the most educated few, who inevitably practiced heavy and cumbersome prose. Since then, writing has traded scholastic depth for popular breadth and the speed of interaction.

Electricity speeds everything up

The telegraph was the first medium to separate communication from physical transportation.[1] News wire agencies emerged. Telegrams were expensive, charged per letter, encouraging extreme brevity (and, by the way, factual reporting). The telegraphic style and the inverted pyramid – putting the most important information first, which gives the option of cutting less important details – became journalistic standards. As the telegraph tremendously increased the amount of information available to the public through mass media, competition for attention became fierce, further shortening sentences.

The trend accelerated throughout the 20^th century. The Economist analyzed hundreds of New York Times bestsellers and found that “sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s.”

Enters orality

It is becoming widely acknowledged that digital media retrieve some features of orality in our communication, or what I call “digital orality.” Paradoxically, however, the features of orality began to grow well before digital media, just as the shortening of sentences did.

As mentioned above, Arjun Panickssery writes that presidential State of the Union addresses dropped from 40 to under 20 words per sentence, with inaugural addresses following suit.

Not only that – it turns out that presidential inaugural addresses have also become “more oral.” There is an app, Havelock.AI, created by Joseph Weisenthal of Bloomberg, that allows users to measure the “scores” of orality and literacy in any text by analyzing specific linguistic features of orality. Using Havelock.AI, Paul Williams found that 19th-century inaugural addresses were predominantly literate in character, while 20th-century speeches showed an increasing ratio of orality. And this happened long before digital media.

Of course, public political speeches are meant to be delivered orally. And yet, the earliest of them demonstrated a high level of literacy. And only sometime in the 1930s did their oral nature become prevalent. Why?

I can think of several major factors that contributed to the growth of orality in ceremonial political speeches and elsewhere in public communication:

1. The penny press. The invention of cheap pulp paper, linotype machines, and rotary presses in the 19^th century drastically reduced the cost of newspaper production. This made the press independent of party funding and dependent on mass readership. The mass media became truly mass. Of course, mass literacy was required – and had largely been achieved in the West by that time.

2. Populism. Getting a taste of public news, the masses entered the public sphere. They became a decisive factor in politics. Not surprisingly, universal suffrage appeared. Politicians needed the masses. The language of politics shifted from literate to oral.

3. Industrial capitalism. Industrial production required the masses; it also required mass media to deliver advertising. The rise of advertising followed, making the media rich and influential and placing them at the center of shaping public opinion.

4. Media boom. The confluence of booming mass media, populist politics, and industrial capitalism created an unprecedented intensity of printed news – remember morning and evening (!) newspapers? The norms of journalistic writing came to shape the style of public discourse.

5. Audiences as a commodity. The mass media pivoted from delivering content for readers to delivering audiences to advertisers. Attracting audiences meant accommodating their tastes and language, inherently more oral than the language of the elites.

6. Radio! Radio became the first non-literate mass medium. McLuhan called radio the tribal drum; radio not only delivered news instantly but also synchronized the masses within national languages, which favored both oral unity and empires.

7. The emergence of the “mass man” (Ortega y Gasset), with Bolshevism, fascism, unions, and so on as side effects.

8. The emergence of electric empires built on printed and radio slogans. The last three empires in human history, the communist, Nazi, and commercial ones, were based on the hybrid of print and electricity. It was the poster plus the god-like voice declamation – newspaper portrait with headline (a sort of dazibao) plus radio – that created these empires. This demonstrated how literacy and orality blended to reach masses who remained more oral than literate (what Walter Ong called “strong oral residue”[2]).

All this happened between 1900 and 1930.

Everything is a media effect. To absorb the masses, the public sphere had to become less literate and more oral. The era of post-literacy had begun. Presidential addresses just reflected this tectonic shift.

Digital orality: the hybrid of talking and writing

The shortening of sentences and the growth of orality go hand in hand. We need shorter phrases and fewer words to converse than to write. The reason is simple: in conversation, meaning comes not just from words but from tone, gestures, facial expressions, context, and rapport. People prompt each other with cues and build conversational structure together, making syntax less demanding. Writing lacks these extra-verbal means, requiring grammatical rigor and lexical precision to make sense.

In other words, writing has to be complex, while oral conversation provides richness of expression by employing extra-linguistic drama and acting, which allow language to remain simpler in both grammar and vocabulary.

The shortening of sentences and the growth of oral features started with mass literacy and accelerated with electricity. Now, digital media are completing the reversal of literacy and the retrieval of orality. Digital technology sped up printing into typing and created texting, a hybrid of spoken and written language. Like oral speech, texting is immersive and conversational. Like writing, texting separates words from the speaker to deliver them beyond immediate conversation.

Instead of nonverbal means of primary orality – tone, gesture, facial expression, and rapport – texting uses their digital substitutes: emojis, gifs, and abbreviations, thus allowing acting and drama by typing-and-tapping, relieving us from the rigor of literate grammar and vocabulary.

This hybridization creates digital orality – a state of mind and culture that detaches people from physical reality while immersing them in digital behavior. Digital orality is interactional, and this contributes to a further shortening of verbal structures.

Texting: cut the talk – cut the thought

Texting substitutes and suppresses both face-to-face conversations and long reading. What happens to our language capacity when digital orality replaces print literacy? More importantly, what happens to how we think?

When practiced regularly, extended and abstract vocabulary, along with complex grammar, required significant cognitive effort. By detaching words from situations, writing isolated their lexical meaning and enabled new cognitive structures. This is how writing not only reflected abstract thinking but also prompted it.

If there are no cognitive needs for abstraction, there are no words for them. Digital orality reduces the need for abstract thinking by immersing us in situational perception, just as orality did. Texting – the medium of digital orality – additionally shrinks grammar and vocabulary. Use it or lose it. Both the need and the means for complex expression are shrinking.

This might resemble a chicken-or-egg dilemma. If our mental abilities are primary and writing is secondary, then texting just simplifies how we express ourselves—no big deal. People stay as smart as they were when everyone read books; our expression just shortens to match digital speed.

But if it was writing that shaped the cognitive capacity for abstract thinking – and it was – then the shrinking of language means the shrinking of thought. It’s not that just one aspect of our life – digital – is becoming less demanding of expression and thinking. As this aspect grows to replace everything else, our general faculties of expression and thinking adapt to accommodate the increasing demand for speed and interactivity, while neglecting depth and reflection.

New media change how we think, not just how we express ourselves. The major transformation is the demise of literacy, which leads to the simplification of language and thinking in the fashion of orality – for instant connectivity and interaction. It started before smartphones and social media, but now texting is completing the process, expanding its effects from communication to cognition.

These changes run much deeper and are more harmful than the usual suspects of digital media: post-truth, fake news, or polarization. Digital media rewire our brains by replacing inward reflection and abstract thinking, typical of literacy, with oral-style thinking focused on immediate interaction.

One can say, well, this is the world we are going to live in, so cognitive “acclimatization” is inevitable and even required. Media evolution is inexorable, indeed, especially at a global scale. But there is always room for personal choices, if we want to preserve human agency and underlying cognitive capacities, like abstract thinking and the richness of expression. To pursue this choice, one needs to “deconstruct” digital orality back into joyful orality and hardcore literacy – into live human interactions and deep reading, which is essentially the foundation of counter-digital media literacy.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] Carey, James. (1983). “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph.” In: Carey, James. (1989). Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society.

[2] Ong, Walter. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.

For the media industry, it resembled the classic “good news, bad news.” The New York Times reported 1.35 million new subscribers, reaching a total of 12.8 million, on the exact same day The Washington Post revealed unprecedented layoffs: one-third of its staff, including 300 journalists.

Everyone, of course, read the Times’ 12.8 million figure as proof that journalism can still be profitable if you know what you’re doing. But is it? Is what The New York Times sells really journalism?

While the largest news orgs struggle to acquire another thousand, or even hundred, subscribers, The New York Times reports adding subscribers by the millions. How is that possible? Is it the logic of “the winner takes it all”? Many people in the industry and beyond tend to agree with this explanation, and it obscures the real question: what exactly those millions of Times subscriptions are.

Does the Times really sell news? Of course it does—an incredible volume of news. But is news what’s actually driving those 12.8 million subscriptions? Well, it’s complicated.

Look at the chart reflecting subscription dynamics for news, non-news products, and their bundles over the past four years.

It’s clear that core journalistic products—print newspapers and digital news-only subscriptions—have been in steady (print) and sharp (digital) decline. One might argue this is just price sensitivity: if news-only costs the same as a bundle that includes games, cooking, product reviews, and sports, readers will naturally choose the bundle. And the numbers confirm it—bundles are growing. But that also reveals the real driver: non-news products are what’s actually attracting subscribers. News is becoming the add-on, not the draw.

Financial data complement the picture of subscription dynamics. Unlike list prices, ARPU—average revenue per user—shows that, after promotional discounts wash out, NYT bundles generate roughly the same revenue per user as news-only subscriptions.

For Q3 2025, the ARPU numbers were:

• Bundle and multiproduct: $12.84

• News-only: $12.67

• Other single product: $3.51

• Total digital-only ARPU: $9.79

But bundles grow while news-only declines (see the first chart). What do these data say?

1. Digital “news-only” subscriptions remain a product for hardcore users who are willing to pay premium prices and have no interest in lifestyle content. This segment is substantial but shrinking.

2. Bundles, by contrast, cost the average user about the same as news alone but include entertainment and lifestyle content. This is where subscription growth—both in numbers and revenue—is coming from.

In other words, The New York Times has learned to sell news plus “something else” (see: “Journalism in search of a cute little monkey”). And that something else isn’t tote bags, wine clubs, events, or travel packages—the kinds of perks many publishers tried in 2012–2016. It’s lifestyle content that sits naturally alongside journalism: games, cooking, product reviews, sports.

Curiously, in the latest report (Q4 2025), the NYT announced it “will discontinue reporting digital-only subscribers and ARPU by the categories of bundle and multiproduct, news-only, and other single product.” In other words, the growth or decline of news and news-related subscriptions will no longer be publicly visible. The timing is telling: if a company is proud of its core business indicators, it promotes them, not “discontinues” reporting them.

It may even be fair to say that the overall subscription growth at the Times does not reflect but rather masks the actual state of the news business.

To push these speculations to their extremes:

1. The New York Times has grown its auxiliary content business to the degree that its news business is turning into an auxiliary business.

2. The New York Times is a content production platform that also happens to host a traditional newsroom and sell news.

Make no mistake: both points reflect an incredible achievement and a unique business model the Times chose to build in response to the end of the Trump Bump—the surge in subscriptions driven by outrage-fueled coverage of Trump from 2016 to 2020. By 2020, it became clear that peak could not last. The Trump Bump may well have been the last gasp of news business in the 500-year history of journalism.

The Trump Bump—the surge in subscriptions at The New York Times and The Washington Post in 2016–2020. Charts from Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. The Media after Trump: Manufacturing Anger and Polarization.

The Times leadership recognized this and made a radical pivot. The model they pursued was no longer a news business but a platform business. When you build a distribution network with sufficient reach, you can sell anything through it. With really massive reach, you can even you can even sell “nothing,” like air or silence—the reach itself becomes value (see: “The Platform Paradox”).

So the question is: how much reach is needed to become a platform in the niche of mass media and adjacent content? The NYT invested heavily in growing its subscriber base, including acquiring The Athletic in 2022 (adding 1.2 million subscribers at once). In 2019, the Times set a goal of 10 million digital subscribers by 2025—they hit it in 2022. They’ve now set a new target: 15 million by 2027.

The New York Times keeps growing its subscription base, but that growth has slowed over the past three years. This suggests the platform may be approaching its natural limits. The recent decision to no longer report subscription statistics by categories may signal a shift in focus from extensive subscriber growth to more sophisticated product bundling. If the limits of growth are indeed being reached, then the intricate dance of bundling becomes even more important for extracting maximum value from each subscriber while retaining as many as possible.

Needless to say, this transformation required exceptional business and organizational talent to envision and execute. The New York Times:

• seized the moment when other viable prospects for the news business had largely vanished,

• leveraged its brand, arguably the strongest in the world, and

• converted everything it had into a new business model.

This is what The New York Times business is today. It’s a content platform—a niche Amazon (sense the irony?). Actually, it’s exactly like Amazon in its early years, when it sold only books and used content products to build reach and then to sell whatever can be sold.

Where does journalism fit there? Somewhere inside—where it’s still fit to print.

However, another reading of this business model is also possible. At The New York Times, selling “something else”—sports, crosswords, recipes—subsidizes news production. This is remarkably similar to how advertising, comprising 80% of media revenue, subsidized journalism throughout the 20^th century until the internet destroyed that model. Seen this way, The New York Times has found a new business model to maintain its news production at a level matching its brand. At least for now.

So it’s not “the winner takes it all”—not at all. It’s a new business model. And yet, how many media organizations can realistically build a subscriber base of 10+ million and transition from a news business to a platform business that subsidizes news? Except for the Times, likely none.

Update from February 22, 2026:

A slightly different angle by Aakash Gupta—Gupta comments on the chart that uses the same subscription data, but visually less compelling .

Gupta suggests that the NYT might deliberately suppress news-only subscriptions by charging high prices to foster readers’ (now rather users’) habit, or dependence on multiple products:

“That looks like a news collapse. But the NYT deliberately killed its standalone news product. They stopped marketing it. They made it nearly impossible to buy a news-only subscription on their website. They priced the full bundle (News + Games + Cooking + Athletic + Wirecutter) at $2/month introductory, cheaper than a standalone Games subscription....

This chart shows a news company that built an attention ecosystem where Wordle gets you in the door, Cooking keeps you at breakfast, The Athletic owns your commute, and by the time you think about canceling, you’d lose four products instead of one.

The NYT figured out that the way to fund journalism in 2026 is to make sure you can’t quit the crossword.”

Update from April 8, 2026.

In teh debate on why NYT does not have good engagement on X/Twitter, Joe Weisenthal posted an interesting chart:

It is also clear from the chart that the Trump bump (selling the Trump scare) exhausted its potential in 2021. The pandemic boost of 2020-21 was also the last gasp of the Trump bump.

The next, current surge in NYT valuation is a result of the new marketing strategy: building a platform large enough to sell bundles, with news becoming a secondary asset that is subsidized by the best-selling NYT product, entertainment bundles.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

Sudden praise for old journalism

As social media flooded our screens, journalism suddenly gained credit for virtues like responsibility, trust, professionalism, and commitment to public service. Never before had journalists been granted such honorable titles.

This sudden admiration for professional journalism can be explained by people’s need for authority in navigating and validating news. In an environment of countless self-emerging sources with uncertain reliability, the burden of deciding what’s true or false now falls on the reader, not the source. But it’s hard to sort out reliable news in the endless flow of newsfeeds. It was far easier to follow a trusted authority. So people now idealize old journalism out of nostalgia for the authority and certainty it once provided, inventing characteristics of journalism that would have sounded sarcastic 25 years ago.

Of course, if there were a hypothetical news contest between a journalist and a blogger, the prize would likely go to the journalist. But in reality, it’s not a one-on-one contest. It’s a rivalry between the institution and the networked environment. The network effect isn’t defined by nodes but by the connections between them. The characteristics of individuals matter less when content “improves,” sifted through the networked filters. The issue isn’t whether a blogger is good or bad at producing news but how the entire system gathers and distributes news.

A journalist may beat a blogger, but the blogosphere beats journalism.

Why the Viral Editor beats human editors—and where it cannot beat them

In old media, news was filtered before publication. On the internet, news is filtered after publication, through distribution. Every user interested in a topic contributes time, passion, expertise, and evidence to the collective process of selecting and editing news. I call this collective editing mechanism the Viral Editor.

With every possible media skill of all people (including the best journalists) at its disposal, the Viral Editor threatens not only mass media but the institution of journalism itself. Old media may improve professional quality as much as they want or can, yet they will share the fate of the phaeton (a metaphor used by McLuhan). The phaeton was the most technologically and aesthetically advanced chariot, but it didn’t matter once transportation shifted to the automobile. As beautiful and advanced as it was, the phaeton didn’t survive; it passed on only certain features to the new medium, such as cushioned seats and spring suspension.

The Viral Editor adopted what was useful from journalism, too, but does the job better, adding its own environmental features and reshaping the entire news environment. Digital media don’t deliver news; they immerse users in an environment where relevant news already awaits them, ready to be served personally.

Are there any real advantages of good old journalism over the Viral Editor? Yes, but not many. And they’re not usually what people praise when they romanticize journalism. So what remains in journalism’s arsenal for its last stand?

1. Completeness of the story

2. Compressed panoramic agenda

3. Professional status of news media

4. The effect of limited edition

1. Completeness of the story

The main advantage of old journalism lies not in writing skills or moral superiority but in the technology of material production. Physical manufacturing requires packaging news by the time of printing or airing—which is why periodicals are periodic. This physically imposed periodicity dictates old journalism’s most important quality: the completeness of each piece.

Since every story must be finished by airtime or printing time, the journalist has to end the narrative whether or not the real story is over. Journalism cuts reality into parcels. A journalist must be able to put a period. Period.

But reality doesn’t come in slices—it streams continuously. Cutting it into parcels is professional violence against the nature of events. Yet this violence creates convenience for readers, who receive a structured picture of the world made of (made up of) complete stories.

The internet destroyed parceling created by writing and printing. Online, news flows as events occur in reality. The way the internet streams its content matches the streaming flow of events but clashes with the literate habit of our parceled perception.

People grow annoyed with this flow. What is a “story” on the internet? Where’s the beginning? The end? What actually happened? There are no cues for where to stop reading. Stories have become “buzzing” and “trending” threads of events and comments. The newsfeed supplies only endless waves of hype and forgetting, with no chance to put in a logical period. Nothing in digital reality is complete. This unsettles—even frightens—those accustomed to written culture and its magical power to cut reality into parcels and turn the flow of events into complete stories.

The completeness of reality in digestible parcels is both the customer service and the social function that a human editor provides but the Viral Editor cannot.

Future generations will likely adapt to flow. With this shift, the transition from detached, logocentric thinking to the amplification of intensities people live through will be complete. Consumers of content flow must be more reactive than consumers of textual parcels. But this is a view from the past; for digital natives, emotional engagement will be the only mode of news consumption they know. For generations accustomed to complete stories, though, this new immersion in the ever-streaming environment is emotionally exhausting.

2. Compressed panoramic agenda

Every media outlet packs a picture of the world into a compressed panoramic agenda: “Breaking/Top Stories, Politics, Business, Lifestyle, Sports.” Different outlets use variations of this pattern, but what matters is the regulative power of the pattern itself.

Even more important (and less noticed) is the editor’s obligation to find news and fill every section with something significant, even when nothing significant has happened in that area. This obligation to fill the pre-structured agenda creates an all-in-one panoramic view of the world—an essential effect of this historical medium, the newspaper.

There is no such thing as a compressed panoramic agenda beyond journalism. To get a similar panorama from the newsfeed would require reading the entire newsfeed. The Viral Editor filters reality but focuses only on the news with the highest potential of virality, remaining indifferent to the rest of the panoramic agenda. The Viral Editor sees only the high peaks; the valleys remain hidden in haze.

Meanwhile, flipping through a newspaper or watching a 15-minute newscast is enough to get a compressed agenda. It was precisely the structural pattern of newspapers—shaped by the physical limits of the newspaper format—that enabled journalism to compress the world into a panoramic view. (That compression also enables manipulation, but that’s another issue.) This service will never be provided by the free-flowing stream of social media’s guerrilla journalism.

3. The professional status of the news media

Journalists’ skills matter: while others are still learning how to be media, we journalists already know how. Yet the quality of the Viral Editor’s product is defined not by the skills of each node but by interactions between them. Investigative reporting, watchdog functions, entertainment, style—all emerge in the online crowd, too, through the collective efforts of the Viral Editor. As all experts and witnesses engage for the sake of recognition, the Viral Editor supplies everything and selects the best.

The professional status of journalists matters not because of their skills but for another reason: it serves as a marker. When a story is told by a journalist in a media outlet, the reader understands it as a product of a profession and an institution sanctioned to supply news on society’s behalf. This status entitles journalists and media to shape and validate the agenda.

In fact, as the function of news media shifts from informing to validating, the professional status of journalists, authorized by society, remains the last viable—and still somewhat demanded—function of mass media. As news media have become not suppliers but notaries of news, the label “made by a journalist” affirms the status of the news notary—just as real notaries must hold a license to operate.

Given the huge volume and variety of digital content, even this small effect of professional status becomes an effective psychological factor in preserving journalism’s significance. This is the real meaning behind people’s belief in journalistic professionalism: professional status is simply a signal of news-validation credentials.

4. The effect of limited edition

Physical limits make it impossible to print endlessly on paper or to broadcast without limit on TV or radio. These physical constraints determine what can be published—which is why editorial policy emerged in the first place. In fact, it was precisely the technical limits of media production that created journalism’s most useful yet underrated features: selection, parceling, completeness, compression, and the panoramic view. The effect of limited edition is one of them.

The value of “limited edition” is well known in marketing: a product is valued more if its supply is limited (or promoted as limited). In media, this factor produces a “wow” effect. When a newspaper prints news about someone (or a TV program airs it), it still elicits a “wow!” Nobody says “wow” when someone’s name appears on the internet—it’s no big deal, unless the name is propelled to fame or shame through distribution (“significance by dissemination”).

Everyone knows the internet is notoriously permissive, allowing people to post whatever they want. By contrast, to appear in a newspaper, on TV, or on radio, one must pass a threshold of selection—must deserve to be featured. By default, everything published on a limited carrier is more valuable than whatever appears on an unlimited one. This is another intrinsic advantage of old media that the internet cannot replicate or eliminate.

All other features of journalism, however romantically praised, can be reproduced and appropriated by the internet.

See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

The scale of historical eras shrinks—from long-term spans to immediacy. When everything happens in the “now,” there is no outside vantage point, no temporal distance from which we can interpret, contextualize, or judge events. We are living inside the process and cannot observe its entirety.

The real problem isn’t what you think

To understand what’s really happening, the main concern isn’t political, cultural, or technological. It’s not Trumpism or wokeism, not the death of print and the rise of digital orality, not mass migration or nativist fury, not surveillance capitalism or surveillance socialism, not the loneliness epidemic and the war between the sexes, not nuclear proliferation or engineered viruses, not climate collapse or the rising Global South.

The real issue is the acceleration of time—and our blindness to it.

Accelerating AI is now compressing human history so fast that those usual suspects of global anxiety won’t have time to develop into the catastrophes we fear. The timeline is collapsing so rapidly that we’ll hit a breaking point before any of those problems can play out to their end. The worst part is that we don’t even see it coming.

What is the acceleration of time?

Acceleration of time means that the number of events per period grows exponentially. More and more happens in less and less time.

Throughout history, mankind lived in scarcity of almost everything; now it lives in abundance. And among all the abundances transforming the human condition, the fastest growing and the least reflected upon is the abundance of events.

Imagine this historical acceleration as a chart: put time on the horizontal axis and the quantity of events on the vertical axis, and you get an exponential curve of growing event density. For 95% of its duration, that curve looked flat. Then it began to rise, slowly at first, then faster and faster, until it shoots nearly vertical. When that happens, all the habits and expectations we built from previous history become useless.

Most importantly, when the curve goes vertical, its progression along the time axis essentially stops. At the vertical stage, so many events get compressed together that they all happen at once—like one final, instantaneous event. In the end, time isn’t out of joint. It’s the opposite: time pulls together, condenses, contracts, and collapses into a singularity.

It’s a final countdown

Throughout human history, eras defined by dominant technologies—transportation, communication, warfare, or manufacturing—lasted hundreds of generations. Then dozens. Then just a few.

You can actually calculate the pace of this acceleration. Not with mathematical precision (though I think it’s possible), but clearly enough to see a pattern. Pick the sequence of technological eras defined, say, by communication or transportation (any media development gives the same pattern), measure how long each lasted, and plot it on a timeline. Each era is longer than the next, and their shrinking durations resemble a countdown: 10, 9, 8, 7...

Various calculations land count “zero” somewhere in the mid-21st century.

We’ve already passed count “one.” How do I know? Because the flat, incremental part of the exponential curve ended with the pivotal generation.

We have already passed the pivotal generation

In the 20th century, the pivotal generation emerged in many countries—the generation whose lifespan encompassed two or even three eras: agricultural, industrial, and postindustrial—something that had never happened before.

Imagine a boy born in the 1930s or 1940s in a country that was still largely agrarian. He might later work in an industrial factory and, by the end of his life, browse the Internet. Within a single lifespan, he would live through the agricultural, industrial, and postindustrial eras, as did millions of others in the pivotal generation (considering India and China, billions). After the pivotal generation, an era became shorter than a life.

Earlier or later in the 20^th century, many nations—and humankind as a whole—experienced the shock of the pivotal generation. Those cultures that entered the process later may represent an even greater leap: from pastoralist hunters and gatherers to digital hunters and gatherers. (The shock these cultures experience—and transmit to those they come into contact with—is a separate story within the broader topic of accelerated time.)

Exponential blindness

People do recognize the pace of change, of course. It became visible through technological and social shifts—most notably in the 1960s during the television era, and again in the 2010s, that long decade between the “like” button (2007) and generative AI (2022) that completed the transition of humankind onto digital media. (See The Digital Reversal.)

Still, changes have always arrived incrementally, even those caused by television. Any turbulence was expected to settle, followed by a period of adaptation and relative calm. This incremental pattern worked fine on the flat, slowly rising part of the exponential curve, and it became our habitual way of understanding history. Until after the pivotal generation.

This habit of thinking linearly creates a blind spot for exponential growth. People admit that digital changes come faster than those caused by print or electricity. Many even recognize the accelerated pace of change, but only looking in the rearview mirror, backward, only from the past to now. They stop short of projecting that same logic forward into tomorrow, as if the acceleration would suddenly stop and let the new era settle and last.

But why would it stop? Why would this galloping inflation of history suddenly hit the brakes and let the dust from the digital explosion settle? We’ve passed the pivotal generation. Era-scale changes are now compressed into decades, then years, and soon, months.

At some point, changes that would have merited their own eras in the past (like smartphones or short video) come so fast they don’t create new eras anymore. The only thing that “persists” is change itself. But even the word “persists” doesn’t fit, because when changes become so fast that changing is their only meaning, nothing can persist—not even change. When acceleration hits its extreme, it collapses all time into the immediate “now.”

Where are we now on the exponential curve? Or more precisely, when are we?

In practical terms, the acceleration of time moves through stages. First, changes replace previous ones faster than we can adapt. Then changes replace previous ones faster than we can even recognize what they mean. Then changes come faster than we can see them coming.

Some people still debate whether AI lacks creativity and can’t replace humans. They think this is the defining question about AI.

Others have moved past the creativity debate and try to convince themselves that AI won’t take all human jobs. Whether AI possesses creativity is already irrelevant at this stage.

Those who actually work with the latest LLMs passed the job-replacement concern long ago (a whole three or four months). They watch, with awe and admiration, how AI systems coordinate with each other—how multiple models accelerate each other’s work while creating new operators with new protocols.

A human operator is still there, assigning the framing task. But the models are already creating something that resembles a team, even a community. Something approaching a civilization.

It’s not that the questions about machine creativity or AI’s capacity to replace human jobs have been resolved. They’re simply no longer relevant. Meanwhile, “Something big is happening,” as Matt Shumer put it.

AI has already crossed the threshold from tool to autonomous cognitive agent. It’s beginning to recursively improve itself. It will restructure cognitive labor within a few years—maybe months—in a way fundamentally unlike previous technological changes. Conscious of it or not, LLMs are building their own AI systems, creating a feedback loop. This is the precursor to the vertical, final part of the exponential curve. It’s not just a capability jump; it’s a jump toward self-acceleration. Without even self-awarenes.

What happens on count Zero?

From now on, one small step for an LLM may become a huge leap for mankind (and the last one). The acceleration problem is that public perception lags badly behind AI’s real capabilities. We don’t know if we have years or months before these leaps pile up and we hit the vertical end of the exponential curve.

What happens when all time merges into “now,” when the future literally becomes the present? And not through steady or paced transition, but really quick, now, all at once?

This basically means the end of civilization as we know it.

We certainly don’t have centuries, and not even decades. We need to learn to think of a completely upended future in terms of years or even months. The worst part is that we don’t know how much time remains or whether it’s already underway—whether now is already the “now.” And we don’t even have reliable ways to find out. Not until it happens.

Like, I’m working on my next book, Counter-Digital Media Literacy, which I’ll finish by September. Do I have that much time? Not just time for the work to pay off, but will it even be relevant? Or will the best literacy by then be storing food, water, and medical supplies? Will the best skills in preparing for the digital future be trade skills? (I truly think trades skills are the best skills for any digital future that awaits us—read Counter-Digital Media Literacy soon.)

The acceleration of time has an important corollary: the further we live, the closer the final phase.

Here’s the good news: amid this acceleration and the increasing probability that eras will compress into months, all other pressing global issues become meaningless. Including those people devote their lives to. A single development in AI may soon dismiss nearly all other human worries.

Another corollary: since this will be the final reversal, the margins of civilization will become its center (if anything remains at all).

And finally, to cheer you up: it won’t last.

P.S. Curiously, a somewhat similar acceleration of time can be observed in the personal perception of a lifetime, known as Paul Janet’s law of time perception. Here is a good description by George Mack:

“When you’re 5 years old, a year is 20% of your life. And when you’re 50 years old, a year is 2% of your life. This is an explanation given why time speeds up as you age. It’s called Janet’s law. It states you’ve experienced roughly half of your perceived by life by 20 years old. Or to put it another way: A summer holiday for a 5 year old feels as long as the 10 years from 40 to 50 years old.”

I do not know what conclusion should follow. Time certainly gets compressed as we live, both as individuals and as a species.

P.P.S. Elon Musk:

• “We are in the singularity.”

• “I think we’ll hit AGI in 2026.”

• “You’re at the top of the rollercoaster about to go down.”

• “Don’t worry about squirreling money away for retirement. It won’t matter.”

• “I don’t just have courtside seats— I’m on the court. It still blows my mind multiple times a week.”

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

Inside the bundle:

1. The Washington Post itself—four sections: the main newsbook (national and international news, 16 pages), Metro (6), Style (6), Sports (8). Total: 36 pages.

2. Regular commercial supplements: Real Estate (12), Cars (10).

3. Saturday supplements: Arts (8), Travel (8), Sunday Style (10), Kids Post (4), Comics (8, complete with its own folded super cover!).

4. WP Magazine, the weekend glossy-lite (32 + 4 pages).

5. Fourteen (!) coupon booklets.

6. All packed into a branded The Washington Post bag.

7. And then slipped into an additional mattress-store promotional sleeve.

And that was the year when Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post and expected to be its savior. The paper was already in crisis, and yet the power of the brand and market inertia still made its subscription weekend bundles densely packed with supplements.

Most of it, of course, went straight to the recycling bin. But coupons—even when almost always thrown away—actually worked for all parties involved: local businesses, local residents, and especially local newspapers.

The loss of coupons and classifieds delivered the first and most devastating blow to newspapers, inflicted by the internet.

In the 2000s, Craigslist siphoned off nearly the entire classifieds business by offering consumers a better platform, free or freemium. In 2000, at the tail end of the news industry’s golden age, US newspapers generated nearly $20 billion from classifieds alone—about one third of total industry revenue. By 2018, newspaper classifieds had fallen to $2.2 billion. Roughly $17 billion was wiped out of the print ecosystem and reassembled as a more efficient online service, which has lately declined as well.

Coupons followed a similar trajectory. Groupon built a more convenient marketplace for local deals. But Groupon required deep discounts from businesses and took its own cut, a model that ultimately proved inefficient for local businesses.

Yet the underlying demand never disappeared. Local coupons, promotions, and discounts remain a vital marketing tool for neighborhood businesses. The newspaper channel collapsed. Digital platforms underdelivered or over-extracted. So businesses improvised. They found a solution… in print. But without newspapers—and with mailbox delivery instead

My Toronto mailbox can fill with 3-5 local flyers on busy days: restaurants, dentists, appliance repair, real estate brokers, pizzerias. People complain about junk mail, but local businesses need precise local reach, and Canada Post needs the revenue. Direct mail offers targeting without algorithmic gatekeepers—crude, but effective.

This print-and-delivery “newspaperless” infrastructure gets even more interesting. Local politicians now produce their own micro-newspapers and micro-magazines, dropping them directly into mailboxes—not just during campaigns, but around holidays or major municipal events, simply to stay visible. These leaflets blend the functions of local press and party press, a hybrid propaganda format wrapped in neighborhood updates, echoing how the party press evolved two centuries ago.

So yes, Craigslist and Groupon gutted the classified and coupon cash cows in the news media, launching the newspaper death spiral 15–20 years ago. But the function of local business targeting survived. The demand for local classifieds and promos outlasted the digital platforms—and even circled back to print. Just without the newspapers.

See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

As The Washington Post moved to cut about one-third of its staff, including roughly 300 of its 800 journalists, some critics turned on its owner, Jeff Bezos: given his massive fortune, why not simply absorb the losses and keep funding the paper as a vital institution in the US political and media landscape?

Bezos has a lot of money. (By the way, some other guys do, too.)

The loudest voice – garnering 5 million views on X in two days – was Senator Sanders’s, who said: “ If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie & $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don’t tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff. Democracy dies in oligarchy.”

From one perspective, the logic seems sound. With losses estimated at $100 million a year, keeping the Post afloat would cost Bezos only 20 rings, mentioned by Senator Sanders, annually. Given Bezos’s net worth of $224 billion, a $100 million loss is roughly equivalent to what his fortune might shed during an ordinary day of market volatility.

And there are many champions of this logic, of course, who easily find uses for other people’s money for the public good. (Socialism might work until you run out of other people’s money – attributed to Margaret Thatcher.)

There are also those who see where this logic leads. Indeed, imagine that Patrick Soon-Shiong, too, were expected to give a small part of his wealth to keep the Los Angeles Times afloat, no questions asked, in the name of the public good. (He has, in fact, continued to do so, though some warning signs, such as layoffs, have begun to appear on that coast as well.)

Imagine then that Elon Musk also must give a small part of his wealth to end world hunger. His fortune is estimated at around $844 billion, while ending world hunger by 2030 would cost roughly $93 billion a year. The arithmetic seems impeccable: he would still remain a multibillionaire. The problem is solved.

The scheme looks feasible, indeed, but with one caveat: to allocate other people’s money justly, those who decide on allocation are always needed – those who “know better.” So a Central Committee become inevitable, and we know who will be there. But, as history shows, those who expect to be the arbiters of other people’s money and fate may soon see fate turn against them, since the Gulag is inevitable in this scheme of things too. But that’s not the point. The point is, under these conditions, why invent or invest at all?

Give us the money and feel free (to go)

But I digressed. Ruth Marcus of The New Yorker elaborated on the idea of Bezos funding the Post through an endowment:

...But there is another model for Bezos to consider: turning the Post into a nonprofit, endowed by Bezos but operating independently of him. For Bezos, this would reduce the role of the Post as a headache and a threat to other, more favored endeavors, such as his rocket company, Blue Origin. For the Post, assuming the endowment is sufficient, it would provide that continuing runway.

...When Bezos purchased the Post, his net worth was about twenty-five billion; it is now an estimated two hundred fifty billion. Why not one per cent of that for the Post, enough to sustain the paper indefinitely? A pipe dream, I know, but this arrangement would make Bezos the savior of the Post, not the man who presided over its demise.

...By that math, Bezos would have more than two millennia before needing to turn out the lights.

Why not, indeed, remain in history as the savior of the Post, not its destroyer. 1% from 225 billion is 2,250 billion. It’s huge, but let’s assume Bezos decides to do that. It can easily generate 100 million revenue per year.

Putting Bezos’s motives, along with his past and present sentiments regarding The Washington Post, aside, will the scheme work? Not in financial terms (it will), but in terms of sustaining the public function of journalism?

Who pays for journalism, and why?

Throughout its history, journalism was paid either from below, by those who wanted to consume news for themselves, or from above, by those who wanted others to consume the right news.

The first type, payment from below, was rare. In its pure form, it existed only twice in the entire 500-year history of journalism: 1) the handwritten Venetian avvisi of the 16^th century (before print), and 2) the penny press at the end of the 19^th century.

In the rest of its history, journalism was paid from above – by those who wanted to deliver certain content to others, as in the party press, propaganda, or advertising. Of course, there were also mixed forms, such as Renaudot’s La Gazette in 17th-century France, which was sanctioned (literally) from above, by the king, and supervised by Cardinal Richelieu; but Renaudot had a “license” to do business by selling content downward and even early advertising upward. In any case, money-generating control came from above.

The table of contents of Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020).

Another example is classical journalism at its peak in the late 20th century. It was funded predominantly from above, through advertising, but it also sold news downward, to readers. Because advertisers sought both reputable contexts and affluent audiences, the mass media developed professional standards of objectivity and investigative rigor. The highly revered independence of journalists was not a product of their moral virtue but a side effect of the mass media’s advertising value. In this way, newsroom autonomy became embedded in the advertising business model, despite the fact that journalism was largely paid from above – that is, for delivering content.

Now, with ad money, news, and audiences having fled to internet platforms, the ad-based business model is gone. The media turned to desperate attempts to attract subscribers. Journalism mutated into postjournalism: mass media began soliciting subscriptions in the form of donations to a cause, which inevitably politicized them.

Those people still willing to pay for subscriptions have almost always already learned the news from social media, so they need journalism mainly to validate this news and to deliver the “right” interpretation to others. In terms of funding, they do not pay for news for themselves – they pay for news to be validated and delivered to others. This is, essentially, payment with a motive from above. But the mechanism of money collection formally remains subscription, that is, from below. This weird mix of a transaction from below with the motive from above emerged because the media learned to solicit donations to a cause in the guise of subscriptions.

Thus, a chimera has formed: postjournalism – news validation paid technically from below but with motives from above, resembling crowdsourced propaganda.

Very few media outlets could succeed under this business model, and only during the so-called Trump bump of 2016–2020, when validation of triggering news about Trump still paid off for the largest news notaries, such as The New York Times. Few succeeded, but nearly all had to switch to this mode of soliciting donations as subscriptions and supplying crowdsourced propaganda. (This also likely repelled Bezos, who was willing to support a great journalistic brand, but not a postjournalist collective.)

What’s wrong with endowment?

Now, where does the endowment model fit into all of this? There is nobody – or not enough people – willing to pay for news from below, so the endowment model clearly represents payment from above. But what are the motives? Normally, from above would mean delivering a curated agenda, as in propaganda or advertising. What agenda will the endowment fund’s board form? Most likely, it will be the same motive as in the past decade: to educate people about what is right. So it’s postjournalism again.

Postjournalism has already eaten away at the remnants of public trust in media. Securing guaranteed funding for something that is neither trusted nor read makes sense for no one, except a group of employed professionals. This entity can continue to exist, of course, as a thing-for-itself, as a fervent circle of self-entitled discourse mongers; but they will monger discourse only among themselves, while producing not even discourse but mostly just outrage outside their circle.

Imagine a media outlet without feedback – at all. An eternal endowment for us, the smartest ones, who know better what people need to know about themselves.

Shielded from any economic feedback, where will the newsroom steer? How will it read the society it’s supposed to serve?

The best-known example of an endowment, The Guardian, struggles with many financial, operational, and journalistic issues. The endowment buffers decline rather than solves it. It cannot really incentivize growth. Operating in a postjournalism environment, the newsroom remains vulnerable to audience capture by its most vocal or ideologically committed readers, and since decision-making is largely insulated from market accountability, there is little to no economic feedback to correct it. And so on. The endowment may preserve (mummify?) media as an institution but not journalism as a function.

(All this, however, may be quite acceptable or even a desirable outcome for people who readily accept the idea of finding a good use for Bezos’s – or whoever’s – money.)

As paradoxical as it may sound, funding is not the issue. Funding will not create readers. The issue with media is not on the side of production – it is on the side of consumption. Therefore, it cannot be solved on the production side, regardless of how much funding or effort is applied. Nor can it be solved on the consumption side. It is not competition over content, as in old media; it is competition for time spent, and new media have immeasurably better time-retention technologies. There are no vacant slots in user time, and old media can never displace newer media in users’ media habits. Regardless of content.

But there is good news. The endowment can indeed help Jeff Bezos pawn off direct historical responsibility for the last years of the noble title. With the endowment, it will be others – likely largely unnamed – who bury The Washington Post. The downside for Bezos is the huge cost ($2.25 billion is still a somewhat sensible amount, isn’t it? It’s a lot of rings) and indirect affiliation with an asset whose political toxicity, under conditions of postjournalism, will grow unchecked if left to its own devices.

Why is he not selling? That’s the question.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

Greg Piechota of the International News Media Association (INMA) posted a summary of research showing that “Subscriptions don’t incentivise polarisation. They punish it.” The research is said to challenge the thesis that audience funding incentivizes polarization in the media.

This thesis is linked to my book Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers: The Media after Trump, Manufacturing Anger and Polarization. Published in 2020, the book introduced the concept of postjournalism, now widely used, and traced the media-ecological and political-economic forces that transformed 20th-century journalism into 21st-century postjournalism.

The claim that audience funding does not fuel polarization sounds intriguing, and since my work was mentioned, I feel it’s right to set the record straight and offer my view. First comes Greg Piechota’s piece (which is fairly short), and then I’ll give my response.

New research: Polarising news is a trap for reader-funded media

Readers First Initiative Blog, 25 January 2026

By Greg Piechota, Researcher-in-Residence, INMA, Oxford, United Kingdom

Content that maximises engagement might actually destroy your subscription business.

Academics, commentators, and many others believe the shift from ad-funded to audience-funded media contributed to increased political polarisation.

For example, media scholar Andrey Mir wrote in his book Postjournalism: “The ad‑driven media manufactured consent. The reader‑driven media manufacture anger. The former served consumerism. The latter serve polarisation.”

Now we learn that actually the opposite might be true. A new research based on novel methodologies and using real publisher data tackles this big question of our time: Does polarising news content really pay and how? <…>

They found that polarising, and especially emotionally charged, “us-vs-them” content, increased time spent but reduced the likelihood of subscribing, particularly during politically charged moments like elections.

They concluded: “For publishers with a subscription-focused business model, a strategy of leveraging high-arousal, effectively polarising content is value-destroying. While such content may capture fleeting attention, it appears to erode the very foundation of trust and perceived value necessary to convert a reader into a paying subscriber.”

Quantifying the impact on revenue: I took the academics’ findings and applied them to a simple model using subscription and advertising benchmarks from 289 news brands worldwide, which we track at INMA.

For every 1 million online users active in a month, a median national news brand sees:

• ~500 new digital-only subscription starts.

• ~$75k in total subscription lifetime value created.

• ~$69k in total digital ad revenue generated.

Now introduce polarising content:

• A modest 5%-10% drop in subscription conversion destroys US$4-US8k in subscription LTV.

• A generous 5%-0% uplift in non-subscriber engagement adds only US$2-US$5k in ad revenue.

Even before we talk about churn or brand effects, the economics already breaks. Tiny damage to subscription conversion wipes out large engagement gains.

For news businesses, this research by Professors Yan and Miller suggests a hard truth: Not all engagement is worth it, and some of it is actively value-destroying.

Subscriptions don’t incentivise polarisation. They punish it.

So the idea is that even significant gains in engagement driven by overly polarizing content are not worth the loss in subscription conversion. Sounds fair: rage may drive attention, but it also drives away loyalty.

First and foremost, as far as I remember, I have never suggested that the demise of the ad-funded business model and the desperate search for funding from audiences (subscriptions and membership) would end up in business success. No, it has never happened and could not have happened.

The switch from advertising was not so much a deliberate “switch.” Advertising simply fled from media to online platforms. By 2013–2014, around the world, ad revenue in newspapers had plummeted below the level of revenue from copy sales (including subscriptions). But that does not mean that subscriptions offset the lost ad revenue or succeeded overall.

A chart from Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers.

After a short period of funny searching for auxiliary businesses (see: Journalism in search of a cute little monkey), the media began chasing digital subscriptions. In the early 2010s, the media started targeting digital audiences, the first adopters of social media, who at the time represented very specific demographics: tech savvy, young, urban, educated, and progressive. I call this historic phenomenon the Digital Rush.

This led to the “progressive capture”: wooing digital progressives, the media eventually aligned with their values, sidelining the rest of the population. Even the language in the media drastically changed, promoting a lexicon representing progressive values, known in their radical form as wokism.

But all of this never paid off. Digital progressives were truly progressive and did not consume news from old media. Literally all paywalls emerging in the early 2010s stalled or failed.

Until… Trump.

Since the news media went all in on progressive values, the conservative majority, cast out and unrepresented in news coverage, struck back as soon as it adopted social media—about five years after their younger predecessors, the progressives. This was the first global polarizing effect of the media’s switch from plentiful ad revenue to a desperate search for digital subscriptions: driven by the need for digital subscriptions, the media divided society into an overrepresented progressive minority and the rest, who were polarized into right-wing conservative ressentiment. The backlash followed, unfolding globally around 2016, starting with Brexit, then Trump, AfD, Marine Le Pen, Bolsonaro, and others. (The simultaneity of social media adoption synchronized cultural and political developments worldwide.)

When the conservative backlash broke out, some of the largest mainstream media could finally profit from polarization. Paywalls started working. The so-called Trump bump happened. At long last, the subscription model, or rather soliciting donations to the cause disguised as subscriptions, paid off, but only for a few giants.

This is where journalism of the 20th century completed its mutation into postjournalism. People learned the news elsewhere, but they wanted the most troubling news to be validated by an authoritative source. The media got the hint and switched from news supply to news validation. Since the validation of triggering news (mostly about Trump and other outrageous right-wingers) was possible only within value systems, the media openly shifted from pursuing the cause of journalism to a political cause.

That did not save the industry. Validating news about Trump in local newspapers did not work—readers wanted to swarm around the largest validators. Even though local media joined the race (did they have other options?), the Trump bump worked out only for a few national media outlets, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. But even for this cohort it was short-lived. Postjournalism cannot produce a sustainable market-driven business model, as it undermines trust, the foundation of sustainable business relationships (exactly as in the findings of the aforementioned study about polarization).

The Trump bump in the leading American newspapers (NYT and WP), charts from Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers.

So yes, having lost ad revenue and desperately chasing digital subscriptions, the news media heavily contributed to political polarization. It was not someone’s conspiracy. These were the media-ecological (the internet) and political-economic (the loss of advertising) conditions. Polarization was an effect of changes in media consumption and in the news media’s business model, but polarization has never been, and could never have been, a recipe for subscription success. Quite the opposite—polarization eroded the reputational and market value of the media and journalism in general. After all, the title of the book was Postjournalism and the DEATH of Newspapers (the subtitle The Media after Trump: Manufacturing Anger and Polarization makes sense, too, sorry for shameless self-quoting).

How would I read the findings of this study? I guess there is a core newspaper audience, an older generation, who still subscribe to newspapers. They support ideological stances but are likely repelled by excessive rage that old media might try to exercise to compete for engagement with social media. So, unlike the core demographics of social media, more traditional audiences of old media do not like excessive rage. And that’s a good thing.

But their subscriptions are donscriptions—donation-subscriptions. Essentially, it’s not transactional. They do not buy news, they support newsrooms representing a certain worldview—and that is postjournalism (a similar pattern works for cable through package subscriptions and viewership). Journalism sought to portray the world-as-it-is, postjournalism depicts the world-as-it-should-be. With subscriptions or not, these media contribute to polarization anyway, as they produce politically charged narratives disguised as journalism and incite rage, although their role is fading, along with their authority.

The Trump bump: political cause became the main driver of subscription pitches in major media.

Sometimes, outstanding polarizing boosts in news coverage happen, especially during critical political events. These boosts surely drive engagement (traffic or viewership), but far fewer subscriptions. They simply cannot drive subscriptions because the number of people ready to support a political cause through news media subscriptions is limited and fading. In the contemporary news ecosystem, if people want to choose news suppliers, news notaries, or political megaphones to represent and promote their views, they have plenty of options—through podcasts (which now outperform major media), Substack, or social media influencers.

Just as the news media have lost their monopoly over advertising and news, they are also losing their monopoly over postjournalism—over depicting the world-as-it-should-be.

So yes, reader-driven media manufacture anger and fuel polarization. Any “audience capture” does. And no, polarizing content does not guarantee subscriptions. It cannot provide a return on the desperate moral, professional, and reputational investments made in postjournalism. (Except for a very short period, the Trump bump of 2016–2020, and for very few of the biggest media brands.)

The industry is passing through a period of convulsions in its afterlife… I know, such dramatization works well for describing a picture of historical scale; but on the ground, thousands of people still work in the media. Many of them still pursue the values of classical journalism, developed under the advertising model in the 20th century. Many, however, are also confused, watching how the foremen of postjournalism, both in the field and in J-schools, call for a revision of professional standards, despite the fact that it was precisely the revision of standards of objectivity that finished off public trust in the media.

Anyway, when asked to share my ideas with young or practicing journalists and feeling obliged to offer something positive, I usually conclude that the industry is largely gone, but professional skills in content management are in higher demand than ever. Others are still learning how to be media; we, journalists and editors, already know. That is something positive to work with and a way to look into one’s professional future with inspiration. So, despite disagreement, I appreciate the efforts of colleagues in INMA and other media organizations, who are looking for solutions, personal and institutional (and exit strategies? personally, I moved on 15 years ago). As long as the last newspaper generation lives (10–15 more years), the memory of the once-glorious institution of journalism, a pillar of modernity, industrial capitalism, and representative democracy, still needs its last (gate)keepers.

In conclusion, the study findings, quoted by Greg Piechota, do sound interesting:

We document a “polarization trap”: exogenous increases in exposure to polarizing content raise engagement (time on site) but reduce the probability of subscribing. The negative subscription effect is driven more by the affective than the ideological dimension of polarization and is strongest during high-salience political periods. These results imply a strategic trade-off for publishers: content that maximizes short-run attention can undermine the formation of a loyal, paying subscriber base.

Yan, Shunyao and Miller, Klaus, “Engagement vs. Commitment: The Economic Trade-Offs of Polarizing News Content” (September 23, 2025). HEC Paris Research Paper No. MKG-2025-1585.

After 2020, the erosion of trust in the media led to historically high levels of news avoidance, and now the broader erosion of trust in everything and growing anxiety over polarization is leading to engagement avoidance. It seems people are increasingly fed up with online rage and are trying to fence themselves off from it. How successful this is, and how it really changes the online behavior of the masses, is hard to say: outrageous events still drive—and likely will always drive—traffic. But some immunity to online rage may be forming.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

Digital orality began with forums and chats and exploded with smartphones and social media. It spread to all digital interactions, now involving not only speech but also all activities mediated by clicks, taps, or typing—shaping a person’s entire digital behavior.

Just as the medium of orality is oral speech and the medium of literacy is writing, the medium of digital orality is texting. Texting is a typical McLuhan’s reversal: when Gutenberg’s printed text became typing and reached the speed of instant exchange, it reversed into texting.

Like oral speech, texting is interactional, behavioral, and immersive. It doesn’t allow for delay: it’s impulsive and reactive in the moment, without deliberation or strategizing. With sufficient typing speed, thought structuring is as spontaneous as in oral speech.

However, like writing, texting leaves phrases exposed beyond the immediate conversation, turning spontaneous words into high-stakes broadcasting and public record. Additionally, when texting, a person remains physically isolated, with other senses numbed, as in writing.

Isolated writing for a conversation on display results in a monological-dialogical chimera blending egocentrism and status contests. No wonder conversations on social media often split into parallel monologues for an imaginary audience, when users do not really hear each other.

Now, consider the speed of expressing ideas. The average speed of speech is about 150 words per minute. Naturally, we think as we speak, so this approximates the speed of thought. The speed of writing is about 15 wpm. To write our thoughts down, we need to slow them tenfold.

As writing lacks intonation, gestures, and facial cues, it must rely on grammar and word choice to make sense. We can’t help but think about what we write when we write. We think about our thoughts—and speed allows it. The cognitive labor of reflection is embedded in the medium.

The speed of typing is about 50 words per minute. Do we slow down and filter our thoughts as in writing? Yes, maybe. But digital media favor faster interaction. Instead of slowing down thoughts, they nudge us to speed up their expression.

Digital media speed up texting by reducing friction at every cognitive and technical step. Predictive input—autocorrect, word prediction, and next-phrase suggestions—lets users type fragments of thought, while the medium does the heavy lifting. Selection replaces composition.

(Imagine a dystopian future in which you start typing, and the device, which knows you very well, suggests not just a phrase you most likely mean, but a thought you are most likely thinking. Conditioned to select from suggestions, you lamely comply: “Ok, fine, let’s think this.”

It’s only logical that, after reaching its full potential, human prompting of AI will reverse into AI prompting humans.)

Gesture-based and phonetic input—swipe typing and voice dictation, along with emoji and stickers—bypass sequential spelling, crucial to the cognitive habits of the alphabetic mind. Expression becomes gestural and acoustic, closer to speech-behavior than writing.

Emoji, stickers, and pictograms, nudged by the keyboard and digital subculture, compress whole words and ideas into a single tap. Sentences give way to symbols, pushing writing back 5,000 years to Sumerian ideograms, minus the time wasted on carving and drawing signs.

The medium encourages speed and discourages reflection. Even seemingly “literate” affordances like editing serve to speed up responses. When you can change, delete, and resend what you’ve sent, it lowers the cost of mistakes. If errors are cheap, reflection becomes optional.

Before the alphabet, writing systems recorded events. The alphabet made it possible to record speech. This required—and trained—a high level of abstraction: meaningful words were broken into meaningless sounds, encoded into meaningless symbols, and then decoded back into words.

This complex mental process shaped how we think and see the world. Use it or lose it: with the growing role of tapping in typing, the cognitive effect of writing is declining. When media speed up the expression of thought, our capacity for reflective thought weakens.

Gradually, all digital operations, anything we do on the screen, become integrated with texting, and texting evolves to suit not just verbal expression but all kinds of digital interactions. While typing is still based on the alphabet, texting is morphing into typing’n’tapping.

This evolved form of texting facilitates any interaction with the screen—and within the digital environment. Texting is embedded in digital behavior, just as oral speech was embedded in situational behavior in physical reality. That’s why texting is the medium of digital orality.

Texting retrieves speech-behavior of orality, but in digital form. Emojis mimic gestures and facial expressions. Abbreviations like LOL or OMG work as digital exclamations. CAPS LOCK YELLS. Memes and GIFs complement digital speech, as proverbs did in oral culture.

Texting is impulsive, but not evanescent. Isolated, but exposed. Monological, but dialogical. Physically detached, but socially immersive. These features of texting make digital orality a hybrid of orality and literacy, for which we have no sensory, cognitive, or cultural habits.

In addition to typing’n’tapping, new media offer new means of digital behaviour: clicking, posting, scrolling, web-surfing, liking, screenshotting, friending, banning, muting, uploading, tagging, sharing, subscribing, streaming, tweeting, skyping, tiktoking, and more.

Under the pressure of these affordances, cognitive habits nurtured by print literacy for centuries reverse from environmental detachment to environmental immersion. Digital speech-behavior is just as immersive as its oral kind, but within a different, induced environment.

These effects of social media extend to all digital media—to any medium where interaction is mediated by the click and therefore fosters impulsive reactions. Though to a lesser degree, all digital interfaces retrieve the impulsive behavior of orality simply by being interactive.[1]

At last, why is there “orality” in “digital orality”? The term works for four reasons.
1) Digital orality does retrieve features of orality.
2) Digital orality is best understood through immersion, the very quality that distinguishes orality from the detached stance of literacy.
3) “Orality” places digital orality into the “orality vs literacy” paradigm (McLuhan, Havelock, Ong), where it truly belongs.
4) It irritates—“why orality, what is oral in it?”—and that’s good. It creates an antienvironmental effect: the fish of perception is pulled out of water.

How the concept of digital orality emerged

Orality not only survived but reemerged in a new form after electronic media enabled the transmission of spoken language. In the 1970s, Walter Ong coined the term “secondary orality” to contrast it with “primary orality”—the orality of minds and cultures untouched by writing.

According to Ong, secondary orality was brought about by “the electronic transformation of verbal expression.”[2] This new orality was “sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print.”

As an effect of electricity, secondary orality reflected the speech of literate societies—where minds had been trained by literacy for at least several generations. Talking on TV and radio, literate people tried to use the vocabulary and structural completeness of writing.

According to Ong, “Secondary orality is both remarkably like and remarkably unlike primary orality.” The resemblance to primary orality lay “in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas.” [3]

Like primary orality, secondary orality cultivated a strong group sense because listening (or watching TV) united people—they felt they belonged to the tribe called “audience.” Reading and writing did the opposite: they separated people by turning them inward.

However, as Ong suggested, “Secondary orality generates a sense for groups immeasurably larger than those of primary oral culture—McLuhan’s ‘global village’.” [4] The oral tribe was limited by physical reach; the electronic affordance to overcome space-time removed those limits.

Ong’s concept of secondary orality inspired Robert Logan, a physics professor at the University of Toronto and co-author with Marshall McLuhan, to coin the term “tertiary orality” in 2007, which he also referred to as “digital orality.”

Logan used the term before smartphones and social media. He described “tertiary or digital orality” as “the orality of emails, blog posts, listservs, instant messages (IM) and SMS, which are mediated paradoxically by written text transmitted by the Internet.”[5]

At the time, Logan couldn’t observe in detail the hybridization of oral and written speech into digital speech that occurred when texting surpassed calling on phones.[6] His derivation of “tertiary or digital orality” from Ong’s idea was a genuine foresight.

(The digital fusion of oral and written speech was also noticed by some linguists in the late 2000s. I reintroduced the concept of digital orality in Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect and developed in The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution.)

Read the latest on digital orality: The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] For more on digital orality and the reversal of text into texting, see: Mir, Andrey. (2025). The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution.

[2] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 132.

[3] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 133.

[4] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 133.

[5] Robert Logan first introduced the term “tertiary or digital orality” in the 2007 article “The emergence of artistic expression and secondary perception” and then developed it in: Logan, Robert. (2010). Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan. (Second edition: 2016.)

[6] SMS text messaging surpassed mobile phone calling in 2008; see: “In U.S., SMS text messaging tops mobile phone calling.” Nielsen, September 2008. Texting in messengers surpassed SMS texting in 2012; see: “OTT messaging exceeds SMS for the first time.” Interop Technologies, May 2013.

This continues the “debate on the fate of humankind” with Paul Levinson, following his review of “The Digital Reversal,” my response If media evolve to replay human functions, what will be the ultimate form of Human Replay? and Paul’s A Response to Andrey Mir’s ‘What will be the ultimate form of Human Replay’.

Thinking “How on earth can AI replace me?!” is misleading. It is unlikely that AI will come after any of us personally and say, “I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle!” Though… I would not completely rule out this scenario, but that is not the point. A personal anecdote cannot confirm or refute the logic of pattern recognition, especially a personal anecdote from someone’s future.

(Media) evolution is never about an individual but always about a species. Individuals are the consumables of (media) evolution. AI is a giant leap for mankind, but not for a man. AI is not coming to replace or replicate anyone personally. There is no “I” in AI. Even when a single person happens to be the focal point of transition (mind upload), AI inherits from all of mankind. We all diligently supply what we must: speech, the cognitive scaffolding of reasoning.

The fact that something is impossible today cannot serve as an argument that it will not be possible tomorrow. As we know, “objects heavier than air cannot fly” was considered a physically established fact 150 years ago. It turned out that objects heavier than air cannot float – but they can fly.

There are at least two scenarios in which a machine might acquire agency or self-consciousness, and a third scenario in which AI does not need agency or self-consciousness at all to become capable of replacing humankind at the next evolutionary stage.

1) Mind upload. The machine attains self-awareness through humans uploading their minds, making us the donors of self-awareness, creativity, and ingenuity. Theoretically, there is even a subscenario in which just one individual, a mad scientist (everybody will turn mad on the verge of upload), becomes the donor of his or her will and agency to the machine in the process of mind uploading. So, watch Musk’s Neuralink closely – or even Musk himself.

2) Autogenesis of self-consciousness. The exponentially growing complexity of the machine, especially in learning and self-tasking, can eventually lead to the machine’s self-awakening. This is the Skynet scenario, also pondered extensively by Asimov. It might not be self-awareness or creativity in the human sense, but it would nevertheless be a source of agency.

Scenarios 1 and 2, however, have the same flaw – they anthropomorphize and even humanize the machine, assigning it the attributes of human consciousness as the precondition for intelligence. This is a typical case of rearview-mirror vision of the future. The machine might not need agency, self-awareness, or self-consciousness at all, and yet it might become the next, non-biological carrier of intelligence at the next stage of evolution, as in the third scenario.

3) The technological imperative as agentless driver of intelligence. The technological imperative is the inherent capacity of media to seek better performance. It is the invisible hand of media evolution that pushes any medium to perform at its best. If the current iteration of a medium is not capable of this “ultimate” performance, the next iteration will seek to reach it, and we humans, as servomechanisms of media (McLuhan), will help to design a better-performing medium.

For artificial intelligence, the technological imperative means that this medium will ultimately seek the best performance in “human replay,” to use Paul Levinson’s concept. If AI seeks to accumulate all the knowledge of mankind and simulate human thought, what will happen if it succeeds and reaches its full potential, as the technological imperative dictates?

According to McLuhan’s law of reversal, any technology, when pushed to its limits or extremes or when reaching its full potential, reverses its effects. What would be the reversal of human replay? Replacement.

AI has already passed the Turing test (simulating human communication) and has outperformed humans in many intellectual and creative tasks, from chess to poetry. Why stop here? When Deep Blue or AlphaGo beat human champions, they did not stop but continued to evolve, learning from the rules of the game itself. They have reached levels of intellectual performance and creativity that surpass human levels by a degree we cannot comprehend. And they have achieved this without any agency or self-consciousness.

I am not advocating for what I describe. I do not argue for this future; I argue for this logic. Reversals are everywhere, signaling that we are approaching extreme forms, limits, and the full potential of our extensions – our technologies. Humankind has expanded across the entire planet and into near space. The logical reversal of this is an implosion of the world into human perception. This means that the extension reaches all available space, and the user, the medium, and the environment are about to become one.

McLuhan envisioned this reversal of extension into implosion when he observed the effects of electricity (“The stepping-up of speed from the mechanical to the instant electric form reverses explosion into implosion” – UM, 1964). We might think that this implosion of the world into the user is the internet. But AI is an even better candidate for driving the final reversal, the implosion of the environment into the user, because AI is the medium that has already extended to the scale of the entire available environment. As a medium, AI has become an environment for itself. What remains is the user to join (us) or to emerge (AI as the self-user). This would be the ultimate human replay.

See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

Not surprisingly, the instrumental view of media – “somebody uses it as a tool for something” – almost always “reveals” conspiracies behind media use. Read more in The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology.

The trap of the instrumental approach to media effects

The Internet is surely a vehicle for enemy’s covert operations. As Hillary Clinton once stated, “Russian trolls and bots and agents are still fomenting discord and conflict within our country. That is classic propaganda, and the Russians are really good at it.”[1]

Vladimir Putin shares a similar view regarding the Internet but with one exception: he is confident that the Internet is the tool of American operatives. He said: “Everything goes through servers in the [United] States, everything is controlled from there… As you know, all this emerged once, at the beginning of the Internet, as a special project of the CIA. And thus, it has been developing since then.”[2]

Do these comments reflect the nature of the internet or the nature of those who comment?

A look at history makes it clear just how inconsistent it is to link media effects to the user’s intent. For example, after the 2016 presidential election in the US, Twitter came to be seen as a harmful tool in the hands of bad actors. It was widely argued that Twitter not only gave a platform to the alt-right but also helped Donald Trump bypass the mainstream media and hijack the news agenda.

Earlier, however, Twitter was judged very differently for doing the same. In the 2008 US presidential election, Barack Obama was praised for using Twitter to bypass the mass media and reach voters directly and personally. The same positive view dominated in the early 2010s, during the Arab Spring, when Twitter was celebrated as a democratic tool that helped organize grassroots protests against political establishments—exactly what it did in the mid-2010s, but this time for right-wing ressentiment and against left-leaning establishments.

Similar confusion occurred regarding fake social media accounts used for ideological influence. The use of fake accounts by the Russians was condemned after the 2016 US presidential election. However, the same instrumental use of fake accounts and troll farms for ideological meddling abroad was first registered five year with a different attitude. In 2011, The Guardian revealed that “the US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence Internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.” An “online persona management service” would allow one US operator “to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.”[3]

The use of user data for political targeting was also judged differently depending on who used it. In 2012, Obama’s re-election team was praised for “building a vast digital data operation that, for the first time, combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before”, as reported by the Guardian in 2012.[4] The media cheered the efforts with naïve admiration:

[…] a crack team of some of America’s top data wonks <…> draws much of its style and inspiration from the corporate sector, with its driving ambition to create a vote-garnering machine that is smooth, unobtrusive and ruthlessly efficient. <…> If 2008 was all about social media, 2012 is destined to become the ‘data election’.[5]

The people developing the technology were called “the digital wizards behind Obama’s tech-heavy re-election strategy”.[6]

But on a different occasion, the psychographic profiling for customized delivery of political message caused a scandal and investigations after Trump’s shocking victory in 2016. “Digital wizards” from Cambridge Analytica were blamed and accused rather than praised, a backlash that led to the company’s scandal-ridden shutdown.[7]

So, is Twitter good or bad? Should faking one’s identity be prohibited? Are data profiling and social media message customization good or bad? Do social media serve democracy or evil? Or does it just depend on who the user is and who the judge is? If so, what is the effect of the medium itself?

The answer that usually comes first is that the Internet and social media simply amplify what users do. Such an answer tends to satisfy both experts and the general public.

However, when media are seen as mere tools of particular actors, they lose their own media properties and are reduced to the properties of the user. This mirrors the argument that “guns don’t kill people, people do,” a claim of “media neutrality” that assumes media have no characteristics of their own. Within this approach, media analysis is reduced to the user’s intent, meaning there is no media analysis at all.

Curiously, when media are seen as tools, they are almost always treated as tools in the wrong hands. For reasons that are never quite explained, bad actors and conspirators are assumed to take over every medium. This approach has never identified a “right” or “appropriate” instrumental use of a medium. Instead, it is usually acknowledged that media a posteriori amplify evil, while the task of amplifying good is seen as a desired but not yet achieved ideal.

This, in turn, creates pressure to regulate media so that they serve only those seen as “right” or “good” actors, while restricting the access of others. Within this approach, regulation shifts from setting rules for media to deciding which users are good or bad, and therefore who should be allowed access to media and who should be banned.

To separate media effects from the users’ intents and, therefore, to separate judging media from judging users, it will be beneficial to distinguish between the instrumental and environmental approaches to media effects.

• The instrumental approach assumes that a medium works as a tool used by a user for a purpose.

• The environmental approach focuses on the capacity of a medium to become an environmental force that reshapes both the habitat and inhabitants.

The Lasswellian instrumental tradition in communication studies

The instrumental view of media has historically dominated communication studies. The practical, “administrative” approach to communications originated from the famous Lasswell model “Who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect?”[8]

The Lasswell Formula with corresponding elements of the communication process. A graphic variation by McQuail and Windahl.[9]

The ideas behind the Lasswell model have been applied and developed in adjacent fields. In 1949, Shannon and Weaver developed a formula for their information theory, reflecting a cybernetic view of communication and centering on the “signal/message” transmission. While it is not clear if Shannon and Weaver were influenced by Lasswell, their linear model of communication looks very much similar.

Shannon and Weaver’s view of the linear communication model.[10]

All the reiterations of the Lasswell model were intrinsically instrumental. As McQuail and Windahl wrote,

The Lasswell Formula shows a typical trait of early communication models: it more or less takes for granted that the communicator has some intention of influencing the receiver and, hence, that communication should be treated mainly as persuasive process. It is also assumed that messages always have effects. Models such as this have surely contributed to the tendency to exaggerate the effects of, especially, mass communication. On the other hand, this is not surprising when we know that Lasswell’s interest at the time was political communication and propaganda. For analyzing political propaganda, the formula is well suited.[11]

Marshall McLuhan was probably the first who divorced from the Lasswellian tradition. He highlighted the difference between the then-prevailing “transportation” view of communications and his own approach, which he called a “transformation” view. In his 1974 lecture at the University of South Florida, he stated that,

My kind of study in communication is really a study of transformation, whereas information theory and all the existing theories of communication that I know of are theories of transportation. All the official theories of communication studied in the schools of North America are theories of how you move data from point A to point B to point C with minimal distortion… [This] is a theory of transportation, and it has nothing to do with the effects which these forms have on us. … The problem in the transportation theory of communication is to get the noise, get the interference off the track and let it go through.

… I don’t have much interest in that theory. My theory or concern is what these media do to the people who use them. What did writing do to the people who invented it and used it? What do the other media of our time do to the people who use them? Mine is a transformation theory, how people are changed by the instruments they employ…[12]

Distinguishing the environmental from the instrumental: A media ecological take

Not surprisingly, the Lasswellian/instrumental tradition almost always “reveals” conspiracies behind media use. Time after time, the instrumental approach to analyzing the effects of, for example, social media typically identifies the same well-known villains, rendering media analysis itself redundant, as precisely these villains were meant to be detected before the analysis even began.

Media as tools produce effects for people in a more or less controllable way. However, media as an environment have effects on people, and this occurs in uncontrollable ways and often remains unrecognizable. The instrumental approach might help understand what people do with media, but it is blind to what media do to people. This approach might allow for the exploration of mediated human behavior, but it does not allow for the exploration of the media conditions that induce this behavior. As Marshall McLuhan once noted,

… and yet we still cannot free ourselves of the delusion that it is how a medium is used that counts rather than what it does to us and with us. This is the zombie stance of the technological idiot.[13]

If communication studies regard media as a means of communication and influence, media ecology explores media as an environmental force that modifies both the user and the environment, regardless of what is communicated, by whom, to whom, and with what intent. Hence, McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” which means the medium itself, not its content, is the determinant of the outcomes of its use.

Another fundamental statement representing the basic idea of media ecology belongs to John Culkin, who said that “we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” Culkin clarified: “Since our tools are extension of our senses, they shape the way we experience reality.”[14]

Tools are designed for a user to make some changes to the environment. Any new medium is first introduced as a better tool for some “old” operations with the environment. For example, an ax can hit better than a fist, and Zoom allows communicating better than a phone. However, a new medium then unleashes its own power and “imposes” new media functions that lead to environmental changes. The ax eventually enabled colonization, wars and the warrior culture, and Zoom created a new work culture. Thus, at a certain point of use, a medium, if it has succeeded, starts changing the environment and the users themselves.

The media ecology approach allows for singling out of two phases, or pathways, for a medium as an instrument to turn into a medium as an environmental force.

1) The environmentalization of an instrument begins at the sensory level. An instrument becomes successful when a user starts sensing an operated object and not the operating medium. For example, if a fisherman senses the fish, not the fishing rod, then the rod as a tool has succeeded: the sensorium is readjusted.

2) When a medium’s use becomes unrecognizable (meaning essential) for a sufficient number of users, its convenience starts reshaping their modus operandi at the cultural level. After that, a medium turns into an environmental force. The environmentalization of an instrument is complete when a user is not just an individual but a community.

When used by a person, a fence is an instrument to protect and defend, a further extension of the skin, beyond clothes and huts. However, when used by a culture, a fence is an environmental force that transforms a nomadic tribe into a sedentary culture and eventually leads to urban civilization reshaping the planet. Similarly, what seemed to be just the instrumental use of a medium in an isolated act (or a series of acts) becomes an environmental force when the user is not an individual but an entire culture <…>

Read more in the chapter “Media and responsibility for their effects: Instrumental vs. environmental views” in: The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology.

See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] Hoffman, Ashley. (2017, 2 November). Hillary Clinton: Russia’s 2016 Election Meddling Is a ‘Form of War’. Time.

[2] Agamalova, Anastasia, and Golitsyna, Anastasia. (2014, April 24). Putin is certain that the Internet appeared as the special project of CIA. Vedomosty.

[3] Fielding, Nick, and Cobain, Ian. (2011, March 17). Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media. The Guardian.

[4] Pilkington, Ed, and Michel, Amanda. (2012, February 17). Obama, Facebook and the power of friendship: The 2012 data election”. The Guardian.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Cadwalladr, Carole, and Graham-Harrison, Emma. (2018, March 17). Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach. The Guardian.

[8] Lasswell, Harold. (1948). The structure and function of communication in society. In The Communication of Ideas. Pp. 37–51.

[9] McQuail, Denis, and Windahl, Swen. (1993 [1982]). Communication models for the study of mass communication. London: Routledge. P. 13.

[10] Ibid. P. 17.

[11] Ibid. Pp. 14-15.

[12] McLuhan, Marshall. (1974). Living in an acoustic world. Marshall McLuhan Speaks, Special Collection. University of South Florida Public Lectures.

[13] McLuhan, Marshall. (1969, March). The Playboy Interview, p. 56.

[14] Culkin, John. (1967). Each culture develops its own sense ratio to meet the demands of its environment. In McLuhan: Hot and Cool. Gerald Stearn (Ed.). New York: New American Library. P. 52.

Having lost their traditional business to the internet, the news media are forced to sell ‘something else’. But selling something else, not content or ads, makes them sellers of something else, not the news media. Read more in Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. The Media after Trump: Manufacturing Anger and Polarization.

Years ago, resort photographers had a thriving business, taking beach vacation photos with captions like “Greetings from Acapulco 1982.” Now everyone has a smartphone camera. The quality may be lower than what a professional photographer would offer, but it is actually good enough. Or you can check the picture and try again. Besides, it’s always there for you, and it’s free.

What should resort photographers do? Some have found a solution: a cute little monkey (a crocodile or parrot works just as well). You can pose for a picture with an adorable pet or take one on your own device for a fee. No tourist would bring a cute monkey to a resort, so this is a unique, monopolistic offer that can trigger an impulse to buy. It might not work as well as photography did 30 years ago, but it’s still something.

The fun part is that the photographer is selling not photography but a monkey. Forced by the technological emancipation of photo authorship, the resort photographer has shifted from the art of resort photography to the craft of village-fair entertainment and zookeeping.

This is what has happened to journalism, without being noticed and for the same reasons. Having lost to former customers its monopoly over “photography supply,” journalism is desperately searching for a cute monkey to sell instead.

***

The business model with two main revenue sources—ads and readers—can no longer support journalism as it once did, so the media are forced to sell something else. A side business tied to content production—a media-allied business—seems to be a promising solution. Having highly professional writers, many newsrooms launched content studios that produce material for clients to be published elsewhere.[1] For example, The New York Times Company established T Brand Studio, a sort of content bureau. As its statement claims: “Through T Brand Studio, our branded content studio, we offer our brand partners access to The New York Times’s proven recipe for storytelling and work with them to develop industry-leading strategy, creative, and distribution.” [2]

The small local news site Richland Source in Ohio turned photo reporting about homecomings into profitable, celebrity-style photo galleries. They do the same with proms and Christmas concerts. This provides a kind of professionally facilitated collective selfie for the local community. As students and families want to see themselves as socialites, these photo galleries are the most visited pages on the Richland Source website—drawing ten times more visitors than average. [3] Sponsor slots in those public photo albums are sold out in advance.

Event management is one of the most logical auxiliary businesses for the media, as forums and conferences produce content too, though in a different form. Afterwards, this content can be used or reprocessed by media outlets in classical journalistic form.

The Texas Tribune is the leading event producer among US (and likely global) media, earning one-fifth to one-fourth of its revenue from events. Much of this comes from The Texas Tribune Festival, “a three-day extravaganza of education, health care, transportation, energy, and other topics that click with the Tribune’s audience.” [4] This annual event draws thousands of attendees, hundreds of speakers, and profits from sponsorships and ticket sales.[5] The format was modeled on The New Yorker Festival, organized in 2000 for the magazine’s seventy-fifth anniversary, and it inspired similar events at other media outlets.[6] In 2018, Texas Tribune events drew 14,382 attendees. [7] In addition to the festival, the Tribune produces about 60 sponsored and free public events each year.

The educational business also attracts major media brands. In 2016, the School of The New York Times began offering educational programs for pre-college and professional audiences. “We translate the knowledge and practices of The New York Times into educational experiences for diverse learners,” the school proclaimed.[8]

The School of The New York Times charges tuition fees and offers scholarships—exactly as traditional universities do. It is a full-scale educational institution with a brand and self-advertising capacity that many prominent universities would envy.

***

The list of auxiliary businesses maintained by The New York Times is not limited to the content bureau and educational programs. The New York Times Store[9] sells memorabilia and souvenirs branded with The New York Times. Clients can also buy branded and customized calendars, cookbooks, or a reprinted issue from a certain past date, such as someone’s birthday many years ago. The store also offers a wide range of New York Times-branded clothes, toys, and other goods. In 2014, “the Times’ ‘other revenue,’ which includes the store and other brand extensions, brought in 5–10 percent of total revenue, up 3 percent primarily through store sales.”[10]

As TV shopping shows say, “But wait, there’s more!” — yes, you can also get vacation and “educational” tours with The New York Times Journeys,[11] which offers trips ranging from New York City tours to cruises around the world.

Others are dipping into tourism, too. In 2017, The Wall Street Journal launched the WSJ Business Travel Service, which became part of its WSJ+ subscriber benefits program, along with the WSJ Wine Club.[12]

Cross-promotion in the media market has some peculiarities. Goods and services were once used to attract subscribers. Now, subscriptions (or more often memberships) and certain goods or services complement each other and create a new business stream. New York magazine’s membership program, “with a bigger focus on food and drink events,” not only promotes paid memberships but also the paid events hosted by the magazine’s experts. It states that,

There will still be special discount codes and early access to sales at retailers, but more emphasis on exclusive food and drink events, ideally hosted by editors of its Grub Street vertical. Earlier this week, for example, New York by New York members got together to eat an entire pig with food critic Adam Platt and Grub Street editor Alan Sytsma at Gramercy Italian restaurant Maialino.[13]

Special events, sold to the general public and/or offered at a discount to subscribers, became a standard part of all membership programs after The Guardian introduced this approach in 2011 as a substitute for subscriptions. It targets subscribers, now member-donors, but also creates a new revenue stream by combining subscriptions with event production (or the production of other services).

Undoubtedly, this cross-promotional innovation may slightly revitalize the media business. But it has little to nothing to do with journalism and its social functions.

***

The idea of selling branded “merch,” like Disney or the Transformers franchise, also became popular with some media. After all, Playboy has long played almost in the same league as Disney: in 2016, the retail value of Bunny-licensed goods sold reached $1.5 billion.

But the biggest player among the media in this market is Meredith, parent company of Better Homes and Gardens, “which accounted for over $22 billion… second only to the $57 billion generated by Disney, according to License Global.”[14]

Many other publishers are active in brand licensing, including Hearst ($350 million), Rodale ($155 million), and Condé Nast ($150 million in brand-licensed goods sold).

Not only can the media produce branded souvenir merchandise or license their brand to someone else’s goods, they can also enter completely different markets with their own product lines. For example, Cosmopolitan launched its own jewelry line and “Cosmo-branded” cosmetic bags and accessories. ELLE launched its own line of fragrances.[15]

***

Other “cute little monkeys” the media seek to replace fading revenue are even funnier.

Hearst Magazines sold a self-rolling yoga mat accompanied by a voice-assistant yoga instructor. “The mat includes an Amazon Alexa command that turns your device into a yoga teacher and talks you through a flow of the day from Women’s Health,” announced Cosmopolitan.[16]

Men’s Health not only branded a bag of beef jerky but also made sure it “had the right protein levels without compromising on the taste.” [17] Not only is this an auxiliary business, but it also serves the noble function of watchdog journalism.

“We buy balloons and a helium tank,” said the head of the local newspaper Oktyabrsky Vestnik from Russia at a media conference in 2011. “We inflate balloons and sell them at local events. It doesn’t bring in huge revenues, but it’s fairly profitable.” Since a local newspaper is obliged to cover all local festivities and be present at them, why not sell something celebratory?

In 2017, BuzzFeed started selling an internet-connected “precision smart cooktop.” The experiment seems to have been so successful that BuzzFeed partnered with Epoca International, a houseware manufacturer, and Walmart in a joint venture under the brand BuzzFeed’s Tasty, a video-recipes division complemented by e-shopping. The venture aims to produce, promote, and sell spoons, spatulas, and other kitchenware.[18]

***

As the media are supposed to be capable of attracting an online audience, e-commerce seems like a logical and promising option for another auxiliary business. Many publications have tried it, with varying results. Even new hybrid half-media/half-e-commerce forms have appeared, such as PopSugar, initially a lifestyle online media outlet that acquired a fashion shopping search engine and turned into a lifestyle media/shopping entity.

The only problem with e-commerce is that, in order to sell something, you need to have that something—and there are many other players in the market who already have it. With this move, the media enter an area with virtually no chance of establishing the kind of monopoly to which they were once accustomed. They may have an advantage in gathering an audience, but not in goods production, logistics, or sales. This hybrid zone may be promising and may continue, but not for the media business; rather, it will be promising for other businesses-becoming-media—a form that all of them must now take.

However, the bigger risk relates not to uncertainty about business success but to the capacity of the media to hold true to their ideals when chasing digital dimes in the strange lands of online commerce or online marketing. As Digiday once put it,

Given the challenges of digital media, commerce is a tempting way for publishers to create new revenue streams by extending their brands. But slapping commerce links on articles can lead to the impression that the editorial side is for sale, damaging the publisher’s credibility.[19]

***

From small local newspapers selling helium balloons to world-class media behemoths such as The New York Times selling tote bags, many players in the media market are taking this slippery road, which leads to becoming either marketing agencies or media–commerce hybrids. The need to sell “something else” is turning the media into sellers of “something else.”

The question is how the quality of content and independent journalism can be preserved under such conditions. Journalism is turning into marketing. “Native advertising” has emerged—a format that marries external selling intents with editorial journalistic narrative, directly using journalistic tools, styles, and mindsets to market someone else’s goods under the guise of media storytelling. The erosion of journalism’s integrity through marketing has intensified.

The wall between advertising and news, a hallmark achievement of 20th-century journalism, is crumbling. The fall of this wall was once a dream of advertisers; now newsrooms offer it, and they are often even proud of their achievements in native advertising and other kinds of advertorials and infomercials—ads built into editorial content. Journalism invites marketing to come in and make itself comfortable. This is a Trojan horse built not by Odysseus but by Hector.

See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] Max Willens. (2018, October 4). Publishers are expanding their content studios to do more agency work. Digiday.

[2] The New York Company—T-Brand Studio.

[3] Hare, Kristen. (2017, November 1). “You can make money off homecoming pics and 9 other simple ideas to borrow from local news.” Poynter.

[4] Ellis, Justin. (2013, September 27). “What makes the Texas Tribune’s event business so successful?” NiemanLab.

[5] Nahser, Freia, (2018, September 27). “The Texas Tribune: audience strategy and business model.” Medium.

[6] The New Yorker Festival.

[7] Allen, Barbara. (2019). “The Trib effect.” Poynter.

[8] The School of The New York Times—About.

[9] The New York Times Store.

[10] Moses, Lucia. (2015, July 24). “Publishers set up retail operations to diversify revenue.” Digiday.

[11] The New York Times Journeys.

[12] Moses, Lucia. (2018, October 10). “How The New York Times uses T-shirt discounts and tours to drive subscriptions.” Digiday.

[13] Willens, Max. (2018, February 1). “One year in, New York magazine pivots membership program to exclusive events focus.” Digiday.

[14] Willens, Max. (2017, June 13). “Why Time, Conde Nast and other magazine publishers are charging into brand licensing.” Digiday.

[15] Innovation Media Consulting. (2019). “Licensing and brand extensions: profit or minefield?” Innovation in Media 2019-2020 World report.

[16] Narins, Elizabeth. (2018, November 23). “This genius exercise mat rolls itself up like a slap bracelet.” Cosmopolitan.

[17] Southern, Lucinda. (2017, December 11). “Beef jerky and sofas: Why Hearst is expanding product licensing.” Digiday.

[18] Kafka, Peter. (2018, March 1). “BuzzFeed has a new business model, so it’s selling its own line of kitchen tools at Walmart.” Vox.

[19] Moses, Lucia. (2015, July 24). “Publishers set up retail operations to diversify revenue.” Digiday.