My new book: The Viral Inquisitor and Other Essays on Postjournalism and Media Ecology
The preface to The Viral Inquisitor
Many people feel like an era is coming to an end, and they are right. It is not just political and cultural disturbances that underlie the latest and upcoming turmoil – the political and cultural changes themselves are media effects. The world is switching from print to digital. Media are the hardware of society, and culture is its software; a change in hardware makes all habitual software obsolete and disrupts the previous balances in human conditions.
The essays in this collection explore the tectonic media shift from print to digital, which I believe is at the core of all contemporary political and cultural upheavals. Digital media have been forming an environment in which more and more human activities now reside. To reveal how the shift from print to digital affects culture and society, the essays employ several key concepts.
The instrumental and environmental views of media represent two ways of understanding media. The instrumental approach implies that media are used as tools for achieving certain outcomes. This approach tends to focus on the intentions of the user and the efficiency of the medium. Unlike the instrumental approach, which looks at what we do with media, the environmental approach is concerned with what media do to us. By affecting us and our interactions with everything else, media have become a terraforming force. The environmental power of a medium is the primary focus of media ecology, as introduced by McLuhan in his famous “The medium is the message.”
The emancipation of authorship by the Internet describes the explosion of people’s access not just to information but, most importantly, to self-expression. Before the Internet, humankind had around 300 million authors in its entire history. After the introduction of the Internet, in a mere 40 years, this number has jumped to almost 5 billion. All these people have acquired the technical capacity to convey whatever they want far beyond their physical reach. This has caused profound changes in society.
The blogosphere and social media have encouraged everyone to share their opinions and attitudes, regardless of how prepared and well thought out they are. Next, digital platforms facilitate people’s engagement in every possible way and even automate it with buttons such as “share” and “like”, while algorithms harvest users’ reactions. People’s reactions to content and each other are the most valuable assets of both users’ personal social capital and platforms’ digital capital.
These environmental settings, fostered by digital media, make society incredibly agitated. Presenting oneself to others to elicit reactions in order to gain social capital redirects the focus of ethics from doing to being – from merits to identities. This affects all human interactions and institutions, including news media, governments, corporations, education, and even personal relationships.
Heavy and lazy authors comprise two factions of emancipated authorship. Heavy authors contribute content – posts and comments. Lazy authors contribute their reactions in various digital forms: by sharing, liking, or even viewing. Their reactions are selective and therefore meaningful – they select content for distribution.
Given their tremendous numbers, lazy authors are the ones who keep the entire machine rolling. Their activity is registered and converted into labor by algorithms, making lazy authorship the main asset of digital capitalism (in contrast to heavy authors – the producers of content and gatekeepers of social significance, who were an asset of industrial capitalism in the print era).
The Viral Editor is a dispersed mechanism of content selection and distribution, a neural network whose processing chips are users. When users see something noteworthy, they share it in the hope of receiving a response and gaining social capital. They want to affect others. If others deem it worthy, they share, like, and comment, too. Each one selects, edits, or adds something in the process of viral distribution, which is why it is called the Viral Editor. Through the collective work of selection and distribution, the Viral Editor turns the noteworthy for one into the newsworthy for many, thus killing traditional journalism.
In the blogosphere, the Viral Editor was solely human driven. Social media introduced automation into the Viral Editor, enabling it to extract not just opinions but also attitudes, thereby expanding the forms and volume of users’ engagement. With this transformation, the Viral Editor has mutated into the Viral Inquisitor (a metaphor suggested by Martin Gurry at a workshop we attended at the University of British Columbia in 2022). The Viral Inquisitor delivers attitudes, not just content, to whom it may agitate the most, leading people to watch each other’s reactions and thus creating a new, dispersed, and all-pervading embodiment of the Big Brother who always watches you.
Postjournalism describes the state of journalism after the news media switched from being generously paid by advertising to desperately seeking digital subscriptions. This change in the business model was caused by the Internet, which took away ad money. It happened simultaneously around the world in the early 2010s. As a last resort, the media all rushed in on “Digital First!”, seeking subscriptions, or rather affirmation, from the early digital adopters – mostly young, progressive, educated urbanites. The media started chasing this audience and adopted its values, having abandoned news coverage for the broader population.
The issue was that, because of the Viral Editor, the digital public did not consume news from the media anyway. The digital public always already know all the relevant news from the news feed. However, when something disturbing happens, people want to validate the significance of disturbing news through authorized sources. This led the news media to switch from news supply to news validation, having become not news dealers but news notaries.
Early in this new pursuit, the media learned to validate the significance of disturbing news within the value systems of their new and quite narrow referential group. But eventually, they began prioritizing news that required value validation and applied these value guidelines to covering everything. Trump aided in this and even made a few news outlets great again, which only forced the rest of them to follow suit and reject the principles of old journalism.
Thus, sometime around 2018, the mutation of journalism into postjournalism had been completed. If journalism claimed to portray the world as-it-is, postjournalism imposes the world as-it-should-be.
The Digital Rush was a cultural movement of the early 2010s, when traditional institutions, led by the news media, rushed to adopt digital technologies and, therefore, digital culture. They targeted the leading digital demographics at the time, the digital progressives, and embraced their ethos along the way.
The process itself is not unique: any medium empowers its early adopters and imposes their values on the rest of society. A new culture always rides the wave of new technologies. This time, however, due to the instant proliferation of the new dominant medium, it took just a decade, not centuries, and the aging of the early new-media adopters could not mitigate their disruptive and oftentimes nihilistic aptitude typical of the youth, normally marginal to the establishment.
The young and progressive digital visionaries of Silicon Valley provided the hardware for societal changes, while the young and progressive discursive elites, among the first to digitize, introduced their cultural software into all societal practices – from politics and education to pop culture, journalism, and corporate standards. Technology always comes with an ideology; this is how it happened this time. Society has submitted to the new values, propelling their source, the digital progressives, from activist marginalia to the establishment. Such was the immediate effect of the Digital Rush of the early 2010s.
Soon, however, reactionary backlash and nostalgic ressentiment fired back. Excluded from the mainstream agenda, the older, less urban, less educated, and less progressive demographics reached the critical mass of social media use sometime by the mid-2010s. Much like their younger and more progressive predecessors 5–7 years before, they became able to communicate to each other their indignation regarding the establishment, now captured by progressive ideas. This indignation, triggered by the mainstream media and amplified by social media, turned into a political demand and led to Brexit, Trump, and all the subsequent waves of right-wing reactions. The conservative backlash of the late 2010s was the secondary, recoil effect of the Digital Rush of the early 2010s.
The sum result was soaring polarization. Political and cultural struggles have moved onto the new media hardware and embraced its settings. Since the main effect of digital media, particularly social media platforms, has been to catalyze self-expression, the cultural, political, and economic significance of identity claims has skyrocketed.
Can a new balance between polarized opposites be restored? It might, but the new balance, if ever established, will be very dynamic. In a print-based culture, the known was separated from the knower and detached into objective truth; this made the print-backed social equilibrium based on a heavy center. In digital conditions, truth belongs to anyone who claims it; therefore, social equilibrium, if ever achieved, can only be a balance between the heavy margins, which makes it highly volatile.
The acceleration of historical time can be explained as an increase in the number of events per period. Human history is shaped by media evolution, with the periods of certain media’s domination getting shorter. Oral communication lasted tens of thousands of years, writing existed for five millennia, printing spanned for five centuries, electronic media has been around for a century and a half, and digital media emerged roughly three decades ago.
At some point in this progression, the duration of a media era became shorter than the lifespan of a generation. This generation can be called the pivotal generation: the people of that generation lived in more than one media epoch, and this happened for the first time in history. For most countries, the pivotal generation lived in the late 20th century. Their lives encompassed both industrial and post-industrial eras (in many countries, the pivotal generation spanned into three eras: agrarian, industrial and post-industrial). After the pivotal generation, technological eras come faster than the changing of generations, leaving society with no time to adapt.
The shrinking durations of eras, when put in a row, create a clear countdown pattern: “10, 9, 8, 7…”. We are living somewhere near the count of “one.” On the count of “zero,” the ultimate historical event will happen. What will this event be? I trust the reader to answer this question after finishing the book.
Digital orality describes the state of the mind and culture induced by the use of digital speech. Digital speech combines the features of writing and oral conversation. Similar to writing, digital speech is produced mostly by typing letters in the privacy of personal devices. Similar to oral utterances, digital speech represents the instant exchange of reactions, favoring emotional responses over elaborate reasoning. Digital speech is impulsive but not evanescent: it can be recorded and delivered beyond the circle of immediate interlocutors, leading them to seek affirmation not just from each other but from a larger audience and thus expanding identity signalling into the public exhibition.
Because of this oral-written hybridization, digital orality reverses the effects of literacy and retrieves the effects of orality. The imperceptible but profound cognitive and cultural effect of typing-and-taping results in shaping new tribal conditions, now based not on the primary orality of preliterate cultures but on the digital orality of post-literate culture.
These and other concepts are applied in the essays of this collection to analyze various practical and theoretical aspects – ranging from the competition between CNN and Fox News, the postjournalism of generative AI, and platforms enslaving users while serving them, to political polarization, the shifting epistemology of truth, and the impacts of screens on children.
Most of the essays of this collection were published in Discourse and City Journal. I want to express my sincere gratitude to the editors: David Masci, Christina Behe, and Jennifer Tiedemann (Discourse) and Brian Anderson, Paul Beston, and Theodore Kupfer (City Journal).
I am especially grateful to people who have influenced many insights in these essays: Martin Gurri, author of The Revolt of the Public, and Robert Logan, author of The Alphabet Effect (among many other books on media) and co-author of Marshall McLuhan. As the reader may notice, I refer to them the most after McLuhan himself.
A.M.
Buy The Viral Inquisitor on Amazon
See also books by Andrey Mir:
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
I also wrote a book, with some themes that bump into yours