E-way: “Voces paginarum”

We continue our series on the history of communication by presenting the works of Hungarian authors who may be regarded as the forerunners of communications theory marked by the names of Marshall McLuhan, Walter J. Ong, and Eric Havelock. These American theoreticians argue that communication through electronic technology returns to some of the communication habits of societies based on orality.  József Balogh’s 1921 study Voces paginarum focuses on the historical impact of the spread of silent reading between the sixth and seventeenth centuries, which produced an utterly new culture of communication. Balogh’s classic work inspired scholars such as Paul Seanger, T.C. Skeat and Pierre Riché, and may help us to reconsider the relationship between the printed, dead text and the spoken, living word from the perspective of the Internet.