Digital orality, the digital reversal, postjournalism, and the future of media
It’s hard to isolate the future of journalism when AI takes over human content production. Interview with Andrey Mir by David Sallinen.
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.
Andrey Mir is a media ecologist who has developed a number of groundbreaking concepts for understanding media, including “postjournalism,” “digital orality,” the “viral editor/viral inquisitor,” and the “digital rush.” He authored several books, including The Digital Reversal (2025), The Viral Inquisitor (2024), Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror (2024), Postjournalism and the death of newspapers (2020), and Human as media (2014). Mir holds degrees in journalism, linguistics, communication, and culture. He lives in Toronto, Canada. His blog on Substack is called Media Determinism. X/Twitter: @Andrey4Mir.
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 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 also books by Andrey Mir:
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)
