Understanding the Law of Reversal (I): Humans as extensions of media.
Review of Andrey Mir’s “The Digital Reversal” in the context of McLuhan’s Laws of Media. By Carlos A. Scolari.
Carlos Scolari has just published a very thoughtful review of The Digital Reversal, which also includes an excellent wrap-up of McLuhan’s Laws of Media, concise and comprehensible. There is also an important shout-out to Robert Logan for his insightful work on reversals and the idea of one of the ultimate reversals: humans as extensions of media.
I am reposting the review with Prof. Scolari’s kind permission.—A.M.
Following the Aristotelian model, this text unfolds in three acts: introduction, rising action, and resolution. The first part is a concise summary of Andrey Mir’s book , *The Digital Reversal*. Before delving into its pages, I’ll briefly review Marshall McLuhan ‘s Four Laws of Media (written in collaboration with his son Eric), essential for understanding the approach of this Russian-born theorist and professor residing in Canada. Andrey’s book is a frenetic textual machine that relentlessly generates sharp and controversial ideas. In the second part, I’ll revisit some of these ideas and share a series of critiques, not so much of Andrey’s effervescent book itself, but rather of the uses and abuses of McLuhan’s tetrad. To conclude this exploration properly, the third act will include the interview I conducted with Andrey, who graciously agreed to answer some of my questions. Unlike the Aristotelian model, the outcome of this story is open and hypertextual, since it inaugurates a conversation that will continue on social media or who knows where.
Media Laws
The four Laws of Media (Extension, Obsolescence, Retrieval, Reversal) are the best-known expression of McLuhan’s view of media and technology. For Marshall McLuhan, any technology created by Homo sapiens is a medium, that is, an artifact that creates an environment (precisely, a medium) that shapes and transforms us from birth. The four laws function simultaneously as a theoretical synthesis and an analytical tool.
On the one hand, these four principles are emergent patterns of media evolution identified by McLuhan and his son Eric: every medium extends or amplifies some human capacity (for example, the telephone amplifies the voice), at the same time it makes certain previous media or practices obsolete, although it rarely eliminates them completely; it also recovers forms or functions from the past that had been relegated (such as orality in digital media), and finally, when taken to its limit, it inverts into its opposite or generates effects contrary to those intended (for example, overconnectivity that leads to isolation).
If we understand them as an instrument of analysis , laws can be reformulated as a set of questions that guide the study of any medium:
Extension (amplification): What human capabilities does this medium amplify or intensify? What new possibilities for action or perception does it introduce?
Obsolescence: What practices, technologies, or cultural forms does it render obsolete or displace? What ceases to be necessary or loses relevance with its adoption?
Recovery: What elements of the past does this medium recover or update? What ancient forms reappear in a new configuration?
Reversal: What does this medium become when taken to its extreme? What contrary or unexpected effects emerge from its intensive use?
The four laws are very useful for introducing the perspective of Media Ecology and McLuhan’s theories to our students; they are also a useful analytical tool that, as a side effect, helps generate excellent conversations about technology in general and the media in particular. Regarding their application as an analytical tool, I have the impression that they are often used to identify only positive cases. We will return to this issue later.
Understanding digital media
As one might expect, the Laws of Media have been applied to the various forms of digital communication that have emerged in the last three decades. I will focus on just one of these applications, that of Robert K. Logan in * Understanding Humans: The Extensions of Digital Media*. Bob Logan is one of the Media Ecology theorists most open to dialogue with the biological and physical sciences. This approach is not accidental: Logan graduated in physics from MIT and for years taught Poetics of Physics at the University of Toronto.
Let’s follow Logan’s reasoning. When we apply the Laws of Media to digital media, we find that:
New digital media expand interactivity, access to information, and two-way communication.
They are making traditional media, such as television and newspapers, obsolete .
They are rebuilding the community.
And, taken to the extreme, they can transform into hyperreality or into the loss of contact with nature and our bodies.
Logan concludes that there is another transformation associated with digital media: the reversal of the notion that media are extensions of human beings. He adds:
“McLuhan suggested that human communications could be divided into the eras of oral, written, and electrical communication. Despite not having experienced the digital age which began with the emergence of the personal computer, the Internet, and the Web, McLuhan seems to have anticipated many of the features of the digital era. Because digital technology pushes electric technology to its extreme, it causes a flip or a reversal of the effects of this class of technologies. The flip is that not only are digital media an extension of the psyche of the user, as is the case with oral, written, and electric media, but it is also the case that the user actually becomes an extension of his digital technology, unlike the situation in the earlier ages of nondigital media.”
Logan’s proposal is very powerful because it inverts one of Marshall McLuhan’s fundamental ideas: the media as extensions of humans, expressed in his First Law. To say that we are extensions of the media leads to a decentering of the idea of the subject—which remained present in McLuhan, despite the harsh and, I believe, unjustified criticism he received for his technological determinism—and to the construction of a negative and almost apocalyptic image of the digitized humans of the 21st century. This powerful idea of reversal will be taken to its ultimate consequences by Andrey in his book *The Digital Reversal*. I read it in one sitting a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t leave a single page unmarked or annotated. A good sign.
The Digital Reversal
Eugenio Palopoli reviewed Andrey’s book in Seoul in November 2025. The review is an excellent summary of a volume brimming with micro-analyses, ideas, concepts, and theoretical insights. Andrey took a risky approach: writing the entire book as if it were a series of 280-character tweets. The Digital Reversal is constructed from small, uniformly sized textual blocks, little bricks that always contain a seed worthy of further exploration and discussion. At times, this repetitive structure slows the narrative; it lacks the modulation achieved by working with paragraphs of varying lengths. However, Andrey manages to plant at least one seed in each section of text .
In short, Andrey Mir takes McLuhan’s Law of Reversal, fuels it kinetically with the work of Bob Logan, and relaunches it far beyond, to the very confines of the media and technocultural ecosystem. In every chapter, in every paragraph of The Digital Reversal , Andrey creatively, sometimes wildly, steps on the gas, presenting us with analyses and scenarios with which we may disagree but never remain unmoved.
According to Andrey, we live in the age of reversal. It’s not just the media that has taken its logic to its extreme and inverted it: all socio-technological institutions and phenomena are undergoing a process of reversal. Phenomena such as the “rebellion of the public,” as announced by Martin Gurri, one of Andrey’s interlocutors, are a good example of these transformations. The shift from a digital environment where freedom of expression was proclaimed in the 1990s to the current polluted pigsty of social media, the slide from truth to post-truth, or from objectivity to subjectivity, are also expressions of this global reversal. The mutation of the consumer into the prosumer is another example of reversal. Andrey’s book contains hundreds of examples.
Like any good McLuhanian, Andrey doesn’t shy away from potential criticisms of being a technological determinist. On the contrary:
«Media evolution is driven by the technological imperative: the emerging force that makes any technology ‘seek’ better performance. Once humans learned to operate with nature instrumentally, they selected what works and what doesn’t, provinding ‘natural selection’ for media” (p. 21).
Pay attention to the concept of “technological imperative”: it’s in the title of Andrey’s new book. But let’s return to The Digital Reversal. Andrey defines this current phase as “digital orality”:
“Media is the hardware of society, and culture is its software. Society follows the patterns set by media. If oral speech was the medium of orality and written speech was the medium of literacy, digital speech is the medium of a new statement of mind and culture: digital orality” (p. 49).
This new state of mind and culture is also the result of a reversal: “Digital media reverse literacy and retrieve orality, but digital orality ” (p. 29).
If writing changed the way we think and allowed us to move beyond the forms of knowledge and memorization of oral cultures, changes in the media ecosystem are producing similar transformations. Small changes—like the appearance of the search bar in search engines—or major disruptions—like ChatGPT—are responsible for an epistemological reversal.
“Digital orality reverses knowledge acquisition from scientific inquiry, typical of literacy, to conversational inquiry, typical of orality. It rewires the brain, shifting knowledge of the world from complex, systematic categories of highly accessible but scattered anecdotes” (p. 107).
Andrey’s perspective, always fresh and provocative, critically re-examines current issues such as post-truth and media literacy, areas where the truth-lie dichotomy still prevails. Truth, today, is a flexible, hybrid, and context-dependent concept.
In the final part of the book, Andrey returns to the explosion of scientific production and the avalanche of papers that is suffocating us (see my posts Political Economy of the Paper I and Political Economy of the Paper II). His argument is very thought-provoking: if the scientific knowledge of Modernity is the highest expression of alphabetic culture, its reversal in the age of digital orality leads to citation inflation, rampant interdisciplinarity, and academic activism that results, for example, in the cancellation of authors. The ultimate reversal of science is its negation: flat-Earthism.
Two paragraphs from the last chapter ( The reversal of humanity ) to close this brief description of Andrey’s book:
“Why do we live in the time of reversals? Because (1) any medium, when pushed to its extremes or limits, reverses its effects, and (2) at the ultimate speed of interaction, everything is pushed to its limits. Everything—from biology to epistemology—ripens to reverse” (p. 201).
“The instantaneity of digital media pushes everything to extremes. Approaching extremes is the condition of reversal, but when reversals replace each other at an accelerated pace and no reversal holds for long, the only constants are the extremes and the barrage of reversals” (p. 207).
Artificial intelligences emerge in the final pages of the book and on the horizon of humanity. After the accelerated explosion of the 20th century, we are approaching the implosion predicted by McLuhan in Understanding Media (1964): “The stepping-up of speed from the mechanical to the instant electronic form reverses explosion into implosion. “In this context, the Singularity—the emergence of AGI—is for Andrey “the last reversal: it will implode the world into humankind, when humankind, its medium, and its environment become one” (p. 213).
As you can imagine, it’s impossible to summarize over 200 pages of explosive, provocative ideas. Reading Andrey is like walking through a minefield: no matter how hard you try to avoid it, it’s impossible not to step on one and set your neurons firing in an explosive chain of reasoning, refutations, and new ideas. It must be said plainly: Andrey is one of the authors who best embodies the McLuhanian tradition today, both in form and content.
Continued in Part Two :
Understanding the Law of Reversion (II).
Carlos A. Scolari is Professor in the Department of Communication at Universitat Pompeu Fabra–Barcelona and Doctor Honoris Causa from the National University of Rosario (Argentina). He has served as Principal Investigator of the H2020 TRANSLITERACY (2015–18), TRANSALFABETISMOS (2015–18), PLATCOM (2020–24) and LITERAC_IA (2024–27). Between 2018 and 2023, he coordinated UPF’s PhD Program in Communication. He has delivered lectures and seminars on interfaces, transmedia storytelling, media ecology, and interactive communication in more than forty countries across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. His latest books are On the Evolution of Media (2024) and Homo Mediaticus (2026). Since 2008, he has shared his ideas on Hipermediaciones.com.
See other 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)
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