The digital age’s reversion to pre-literate communication
Digital tools are pulling us away from fixed texts and back toward fluid, interactive communication.
The following essay was adapted from media ecologist Andrey Mir’s 2025 book, The Digital Reversal, which argues that a “reversal” occurs when a medium pushed to its extreme flips its effects into their opposites. Written in tweets, the book itself is a reversal — from long-form writing to a more digital form. Each paragraph does not exceed 280 characters, making it a “tweetise” — a reversal of treatise. The book contains 1,295 tweets, stitched into a “thread-saga of media evolution.”
By Andrey Mir
According to media theorist Marshall McLuhan, every medium is an extension of our physical or mental faculties. The hammer extends our fist, the spear our teeth, the hut our skin, the wheel our feet — and electronic media extend our central nervous system to all of humankind.
Extended abilities give us new powers but disrupt previous sensory, cognitive, and social settings. As humankind switched to the internet, printing no longer defines the protocols humans live by. Print-based culture is collapsing.
The era of printing was, in fact, very short by historical standards — about 550 years. Some call this period the Gutenberg Parenthesis — a metaphor popularized by Jeff Jarvis. Within this Parenthesis, communication was centered around fixed, authored, linear, and stable texts.
Things were different before books. Communication was fluid and situational, passed mostly through direct interaction between people. The internet has largely restored those conditions: digital content is updated, shared, and much of it is user-generated — just like in orality.
Books withdrew both author and reader from the surrounding reality and turned them inward, into contemplation. Before literacy, it was different — people were immersed in the flow of events. This pattern returns: people are once again immersed in a flow — this time, a digital one.
Get expert classes, premium print issues and exclusive events.
As digital media reverse the cognitive detachment typical of print culture and retrieve the situational immersion typical of orality, not only is the Gutenberg Parenthesis closing, but the metaphor of a closing parenthesis — or arc — can be extended to the entire era of literacy.
The environmental detachment as a media effect appeared before print — it was the effect of writing. Writing separated the known from the knower (Havelock) and made it possible to contemplate things “from outside” interaction with them.
“Oral Greek did not know what an object of thought was,” wrote Havelock. To catch thought, the flow of words had to be arrested, and words needed to be captured and separated from the thinker. Writing made this possible by putting words before the individual for contemplation.
Homer, enchanted by the sensory immersion of orality, sang about beautiful wine or beautiful armor. Aristotle, a writing philosopher, was able to discover beauty. No longer satisfied with explanations through sensations and analogies, thinkers began to ponder ideas.
Detached and introspective thinking, capable of using thought itself as a tool, fully unfolded the effects of writing sometime between the 8th and 3rd centuries BCE — a period that German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age.
According to Jaspers, the Axial Age was a period of human “awakening.” Fundamental philosophical and religious doctrines emerged in China, India, and the Middle East, along with Greece. Humans became aware of their own existence. Historical consciousness emerged.
Intellectual and spiritual awakening pulled humans out of the natural cycles of thoughtless survival and led them to inquire into the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. The Axial Age began transforming humans’ tribal existence into complex societies.
“What is new about this age, in all three areas of the world, is that man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations. He experiences the terror of the world and his own powerlessness. He asks radical questions,” wrote Jaspers.
Jaspers saw history as a process of emerging human self-consciousness, leading humans to recognize their belonging to humankind. The Axial Age’s spiritual and intellectual power created the unifying force that led humankind to unity (confirmed, paradoxically, by the World Wars).
Jaspers admitted he couldn’t find a single decisive cause of the Axial Age. From the perspective of media ecology, however, introspective and abstract thinking were the cumulative effects of writing, with its environmental detachment and “inward turn” (Ong).
In the 21st century, writing is fading. Digital media have twisted the “inward turn” of literacy like a Möbius strip: the user remains immersed in the self physically, but the self is extended outward digitally.
With this digital twist, cognitive detachment, typical of literacy, is reversing into situational immersion, typical of orality. That is why the historical arc that digital media are closing is larger than just the Gutenberg Parenthesis — it covers the entire era of literacy.
Electronic and now digital media not only close this historical arc but do so at an incredibly asymmetric speed. “What took several thousand years to complete has taken us only a few decades to reverse: the West now bathes in the emotions of postliteracy,” said McLuhan.
The Axial Age lasted six centuries and predefined the next two millennia. The new Digital Axis started with the internet, with its most pivotal (so far) events squeezed into the long decade of the 2010s — between the emergence of social media and the emergence of generative AI.
It was social media that retrieved orality-like immersion, finishing off literacy. Generative AI seems to be the next pivot, beginning something bigger: strong AI (AGI), which will likely pick up the torch of intelligence from its biological predecessor — us.
The Digital Axis is a long “decade” indeed, yet it’s immeasurably shorter than the Axial Age and the millennia of civilization it inspired. So, we live in the Axial Decade, which is rapidly rewinding the historical Axial Age and reversing its key cognitive and social effects.
The Axial Age awakened humankind. What will the Axial Decade awaken? Will the awakening of LLMs (or what comes next) lead to the final reversal — also known as the “singularity”? My answer is yes. Jaspers’ “man becomes conscious of Being as a whole” sounds anew in the age of AI.
It is for this “Being as a whole” that our being transitions from physical to digital. When the user, its medium, and its environment merge into one, this “one” becomes the self-user, reaching true totality and immediacy of (self) immersion. But that’s a story for another time.
This book focuses on the reversals of the Axial Decade. The turmoil of the Axial Age lasted for centuries and allowed people to adapt through generational change, yet they were stunned. The piled-up disturbances of the Axial Decade are compressed into one generation’s lifespan.
What are these reversals? According to McLuhan, when a medium or technology is pushed to its extremes or reaches its limits, its full potential, it tends to flip or reverse its characteristics or effects into something different, often opposite.
The clearest example is the effect of cars. Cars enhance mobility and transportation. But when there are too many of them, their effect reverses from speed and freedom to the opposite: traffic jams.
Digital media pushed human interactions to their limits. First, digital speed makes signals move in the networks faster than in our neural system. Never before has the speed of our interactions with the world exceeded our neuro-capacity. This speed pushes us to the limits.
Second, not just communication but nearly all human interactions are digital, and thus they are all reaching ultimate speed. Third, nearly all humankind is digitized, and the demographic transition to digital, which took the long Digital Decade (from “like” to AI), is complete.
So, digital media have 1) sped up our interaction with the world and each other to their limits, 2) encompassed nearly all human activities, and 3) involved nearly all countries and humans. We have reached the limits of speed, scope, and demographics in this new medium.
Reaching the limits of a technology is the prerequisite for reversal. No wonder everything feels upside down. The logic of media is implacable: when digital media reach everyone and everything and speed our interactions up to extreme intensity, things flip into their opposites.
That is why we are living not just through the era of digital transformation but through the era of digital reversals. One tectonic reversal—the Digital Reversal—consists of countless reversals across all aspects of human life.
The abundance of signals reverses into noise. The abundance of facts reverses into fakes. Free access to self-expression on social media leads to abuse by trolls and bad actors and reverses into censorship. The revolt of the public reverses into anarcho-tyranny.
The abundance of choices flips into decision paralysis. The overload of news reverses into news fatigue and news avoidance. The collective mechanism of content selection—the Viral Editor—reverses into collective content policing: the Viral Inquisitor that watches you.
Put to use in digital conversation, text reverses into texting and reverses delayed, solitary reasoning into impulsive exchange. Abstraction reverses into anecdotal evidence. Feelings reverse into intensities. Boosted by empathy overload, identity reverses into credentials.
The business of news media reversed from plentiful ad revenue to desperately seeking digital subscriptions. This business shift reverses news supply into news validation. Journalism reverses into postjournalism, reversing professional standards from impartiality to activism.
Patriarchy reverses into feminism, and feminism reverses into gender fluidity. The camera enabled capturing reality, but eventually reversed its effect into staging reality for the camera to capture. The society of the spectacle reverses into the digital carnival.
Print-based literacy reverses into digital orality. Reading books reverses into asking the search box. Knowledge reverses into knowing. Escalated by digital media, academia flips into activism. Objective truth reverses into crowdsourced importance.
Pushed to extremes by the digital speed of interaction, we experience reversals in all aspects of our existence—politics, culture, epistemology, even sensorium and biology. Will humankind, approaching its limits, itself reverse into something opposite to its biological nature?
Considering AI, that’s now a possibility many ponder. If media extend the user into the environment, then the ultimate extension will lead the user, the medium, and the environment to merge—to become one, just as we were once one with nature. But nature is digital now.
AI already embodies a part of this merger: AI is a medium that is the environment to itself. What is lacking is only the merger with its user: us—or some new entity, if AI becomes a self-user.
Before it happens, we will enjoy everything reaching its extreme forms and reversing, then reaching new extremes and reversing again. The Digital Reversal may be historically instant compared to Jaspers’ Axial Age, but it fills the entire lives of people living now.
I disagree. The so called Digital Age is not pulling us toward fluid, interactive communication. It is pulling us toward force fed communication and isolation. When was the last time that you called someone on the telephone or met with them in person rather than simply sending a text message and walking away. The Digital Age the author idealizes and mimics in her book is grim, dingy, and full of loneliness and rage.
In the first place, Internet communication in no way resembles the oral traditions before literacy. The Internet is simply a different kind of "literacy". Oral traditions were limited to specific environmental conditions and generalized beliefs necessarily because of the limits of human memory and comprehension. The Internet is no different than other mechanisms for extending our senses and, therefore, our "understanding" because it connects all people, all places, and all of our knowledge. To claim an "intellectual and spiritual awakening pulled humans out of the natural cycles of thoughtless survival and led them to inquire into the meaning of life", is both demeaning and ridiculous. Anyone actually familiar with indigenous people outside of our vaunted academia recognizes that they have/had, not only very complex and useful intellectual methods of seeing the world, but also valuable knowledge that is now lost thanks to the way they were disparaged and annihilated by genocide, not cultural superiority. Adaptation and reason in all their various guises are the hallmarks of the human species. It was an evolutionary response to our obvious lack of all but the most basic instincts and physical strengths. This treatise devolves into a rabbit hole quite typical of our newfound "enlightenment". In conclusion, AI will be weaponized, just like nuclear energy and other scientific revelations in order to cater to the same base instincts that have driven our behavior since our existence arose. Not to worry, however. It's worth noting that we are already the last of our genus. Mother Nature will bring the world back into balance with or without us, AI, or anything else we dream up.