Reading in the digital world

Abstract

This essay discusses the relationship among reading, written and oral language, considering their mixture in the digital world. It calls our attention to the coexistent proceedings apparently exclusives such as reading in the screen as if the reader was reading the newspapers, turning the sheets. In addition it provides a historical review of written language and its changes in the course of human experience. On the other hand, the text comments about the expansion of written uses of language in the digital medium and, at the same time, tells us the results that all of those changes have produced in the written register that became characterized through its vulnerability; in fact it has been observed that there was no submission of digital writing to the norms which try to control it, domesticating its way of expression. If nowadays, reading sustains written language trying to conventionalize it, orality interposes itself between them making human communication more complex and instigating, in the digital world, which has reached inconstant and mutational forms.