“The fish is not aware of the water it swims in” was one of McLuhan’s favorite themes. On many occasions, he advanced the concept of the anti-environment as the condition for gaining awareness of the environment. The fish needs to be pulled out of the water. Read more in: The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution.
No one teaches how to integrate into natural conditions—how to breathe, for example. This “skill” comes naturally. Media literacy must focus on withstanding the natural forces of the digital environment. Like yoga, it should train users how not to breathe—for better self-control.
As there is simply no practical need for “how-to” environmental media literacy, digital media literacy has to become anti-environmental—counter-digital. In digital reality, media literacy is not about how to use—it should be about how not to use.
Counter-digital media literacy should focus on regaining control by pushing back against the “natural” environmental urges. In digital reality, media literacy means time management in professional life and time hygiene in personal life—with the two gradually merging.
“Is not the essence of education civil defence against media fallout?” asked McLuhan[ii] in 1962. Yet contemporary education actively spread digital fallout—first by embracing the popular idea of “immersive learning,” then by submitting the entire educational process to the digital.
Before writing, there were two main ways to learn—apprenticeship and storytelling. Both were forms of “immersive learning” because they required verbomotor synchronization with a master craftsman or a bard.
Suddenly, something different happened in Sumerian scribe schools five millennia ago. Pupils still repeated after the master scribe, but they also had to sit still and focus—immersed in writing and reading, paying attention to the signs in front of them and in their minds.
Viewing and contemplating signs numbs the other senses. Learning to read and write pulls attention away from the surroundings. Writing broke situational immersion and enabled the “inward turn.” Prolonged writing and reading favored environmental detachment.
Education—studying the world through abstractions—emerged precisely because of this effect of writing. Diligent self-immersion while contemplating abstractions was both the condition and the product of education. It trained the “inward turn” of literacy from a young age.[iii]
“Immersive learning” does the opposite—it promotes sensory engagement and empathic involvement instead of the “inward turn.” That’s why “immersive learning” directly undermines print literacy, dismantling the core condition of education and contributing to retribalization.
The issue is systemic: a professor can’t get a high score in student evaluations by forcing students into deep and complex reading. Instead, entertainment has become the key to pedagogical success.
But learning through entertainment teaches being entertained. Learning by easing effort teaches effortlessness. True studying has to entertain the intellect, not the sensorium. Having abandoned enforced, cover-to-cover reading, education now leads the anti-literate turn.
***
Participatory forms of education, like other oral residues, have always been there. But the reversal of literate education into “immersive learning” began with TV. Seeking to spark kids’ interest, educators were seduced by the attention-grabbing power of TV-driven mass culture.
There was a belief, for example, that Sesame Street had a strong and positive educational effect. Innovators sought to employ TV formats and video courses as an advanced method of knowledge delivery, with no understanding of what TV does as a medium.
Digital media completed the reversal, because any use of digital media is inherently immersive. Transferring nearly all education to digital means makes all education immersive. No wonder reading has collapsed at the societal scale in just a decade—the Axial Decade.
It has become the new normal in schools and even universities to assign reading selected pages, not whole books. Few in Gen Z have read an entire book. Meanwhile, complete, cover-to-cover book reading shapes one of the crucial effects of literacy—world structuring.
Digital media do not enhance learning—they replace it with oral-like immersion. AI brought the process of literacy’s demise in education to its logical end: generative AI has reversed learning into cheating. Married to devices, “immersive learning” has fulfilled its potential.
***
As long as media literacy is part of an educational system with such digital bias, it promotes digital use to the detriment of actual literacy. Media literacy that serves better digital immersion, in effect, improves the cognitive and social conditions for orality and tribalism.
To withstand the environmental—social, commercial, and now even educational—pressure of digital immersion, digital media literacy has to be counter-digital. Education seems to have been lost for this task, but individual and parental efforts are still possible.
“Phonetic literacy is the only detribalizing technology known to man,” said McLuhan.[v] To stand on McLuhan’s shoulders: long reading is the only detribalizing technology known in a society slouching toward digital orality.
What reading is long enough to enable the “inward turn”? TV bosses found that a series episode can hold attention for 30 minutes, an hour at most. Maybe book immersion, sufficient to trigger the “inward turn” and train the brain in literacy, begins only after an hour of reading.
Yes, TV consumption includes binge watching. Though it requires a lengthy commitment—seemingly against the trend of shrinking attention—it doesn’t trigger the inward turn. Instead, it draws viewers deeper into oral-tribal immersion through electronically enhanced storytelling.
Contrarily, good-old binge reading—when a 500-page book makes us read all day long—is a training ground for the cognitive habits of literacy. Hours of inner contemplation over stories or ideas, with no sensory tethers, keep the mind sharp for everything else literacy demands.
Besides long and deep reading, anti-environmental counter-digital media literacy includes other techniques—from hormonally competing non-digital activities (which resemble, alas, addiction therapy) to practicing digital detox and training tolerance for fakes.[vi]
***
Counter-digital media literacy also has a therapeutic effect: it helps us understand that the demise of literacy and the slouching toward tribalism are not human faults. These are effects of the immersive power of digital media, which retrieve the oral conditions of tribalism.
Everything is a media effect. The same people can be more tolerant, considerate, and committed to objective truth when focused on subject matter—or more intrusive and intolerant when focused on social affirmation. The former is the effect of literacy; the latter, of orality.
Imagine the same people debating a subject via old-style correspondence or on social media. The medium of letter exchange will make them substance-focused and polite, while digital debate on display will favor attention-seeking and agonism.
Even the way we read differs between book and screen. Book reading activates brain areas for visual focus, enabling inner concentration. Screen reading offers affordances like clicking and sharing, activating brain areas tied to micro-decisions and prompting mind-wandering.
If newer media are introduced into a child’s life before older media—screen before book—it disrupts the “evolutionary logic” of the child’s sensory, cognitive, moral, and emotional development. Learning to use a touchscreen disables the book reader.
These effects of digital media remain largely unrecognized. But they impact cognitive and social conditions, and people change their behavior. This change is visible, so we tend to blame people for it. Anxiety builds at the societal level, leading to rage and polarization.
It doesn’t mean people aren’t responsible for their actions. But knowing media effects is a mitigating factor that allows for leniency when judging others. Paradoxically, admitting the limits of human agency in media use helps rehumanize digital social dynamics. Blame the media.
But in reality, “Instead of blaming the medium, we blame the other party,” said Douglas Rushkoff in Team Human.[vii] Recognizing the cognitive and social power of digital media over human behavior is the starting point for anti-environmental counter-digital media literacy.
[vii] Rushkoff, Douglas. (2019). Team Human. P. 73. Rushkoff is one of the most incisive media ecologists in the world and knows perfectly what media do to us and how. Nevertheless, he takes a moral stance and insists on people’s ability—and even duty—to seize back control of media evolution; hence, “Team Human.”
