A visual media ecology simulation

Keeper of the Word

One message has been entrusted to you. Carry it through five transformations of the word — from the firelight council to typographic print, broadcast television, algorithmic feeds, and generative AI. Every choice restructures your sensorium, and every medium charges for carriage. At the end, we'll see what survived — and whether anyone still stands behind it.

The entrusted message · spoken by Saima of Miller's CrossingOrigination: human

“The river always returns to collect what it has lent. Carry the children high, and speak no word you will not stand behind.”

Phases I–III after Walter J. Ong (1982), Orality and Literacy. Phases IV–V proposed by Micah J. Miner, Beyond Secondary Orality: Tertiary Algorithmicity & Pedagogical Friction.

Fidelity 100

Text integrity & contextual meaning

Reach 1

Scale of message propagation

Origination Human

Embodied human consciousness

State of the message in your sensoriumOrigination: human

FIND THE HUMAN — 10 seconds

The journey's end

CARRIED FIDELITY

FINAL REACH

ORIGINATION

For four rounds, this simulation taught you to protect fidelity — the exact wording. The final round revealed a variable you were never shown: origination. When algorithms can produce the symbolic environment itself, a message can be word-perfect and authored by no one. What this condition does to humanistic agency, and to the student sensorium, is an open empirical question — the core question this research pursues.

Framework: Miner, extending Ong (1982). micahminer.com

Theoretical deep dive

Five Phases of the Technologized Word

Phase	Core Technology	Media Environment	Human Role	Cognitive Consequence
Primary Orality	Voice (sound)	Ephemeral, face-to-face, localized	Sole creators, active dialogue	Situational, formulaic, communal mind
Literacy & Print	Writing / printing press	Durable, spatialized, distanced	Sole creators, individual reader	Abstract, linear, individual interiority
Secondary Orality	Electronic broadcast (TV/radio)	Immediate, mass-mediated, centralized	Sole creators, mass simultaneous audience	Scripted spontaneity, broadcast unity
Algorithmic Secondary Orality	Social feeds & recommendation systems	Curated, personalized, fragmented	Creators; circulation delegated to machines	Secondary oral, under algorithmic conditions
Tertiary Algorithmicity	Generative AI (LLMs)	Synthetic, saturated, instant	Optional creators; algorithms can produce and circulate	Open empirical question — the focus of this research

Think you can hold the boundaries? Ten scenarios, including the hard cases at the seams between phases.