Andrey Mir
1 min readAug 14, 2018

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Thank you very much, very important questions are raised.
“Human beings were never born to read” — is really good. And, because of it, I would argue with the next statement: “The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens.” This is an old textocentric (semiotic) approach, which is overcoming right now.
I would say that the most important achievement is the ability to effectively connect minds through time and space. This is what literacy was for. And new media technologies facilitate it way better than good old slow bulky cumbersome writing.
And we have not achieved the “phaeton-stage” of new media technologies yet. Logically, media aim to connect thoughts, not minds. Cognitive interfaces, digital uploading — all this is what is waiting us ahead.
(Also: evolution is not about an individual, it’s about a species. Personal impressions or use of reading are irrelevant. An individual always suffers for a species to survive or develop. (Though mega-evolution is not even about a species.))

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Andrey Mir

Media futurologist, the author of “Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror”(2024), “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers”(2020), and “Human as media”(2014)