The Difference Between Oral, Print and Digital Societies

Ambrose, the bishop of Milan (c. 339–397), is the first man in recorded history to read silently. As St. Augustine writes in his Confessions, when the bishop used to read:

his eyes were drawn through the pages, while his heart searched for its meaning; however, his voice and tongue were quiet. Often when we were present — for anyone could approach him and it was not his habit that visitors be announced to him — we saw him reading in this fashion, silently and never otherwise

Although there’s some debate about this, the general consensus is that this is remarkable to Augustine because, during his time, ‘silent reading wasn’t really a thing’. However, recent findings suggest that silent reading has never been a thing. Apparently, when we read ‘we are generating very low-levels of motor activity in our throat’, which means:

we are speaking the words that we are reading at a level below the perception of sound or our own perception of those words. But if one were to put an amplifier or to measure the firing of those muscles in our vocal chords, we’d find that as we’re reading information, we are actually speaking that information (Huberman)

This means that silent reading is really quiet speaking, which challenges the distinction between oral and written literature. Derrida’s…