Reading with Ears and Writing with Voices: The Aural and Oral Turn in Digital Communication and Media Culture

The monograph Reading with Ears and Writing with Voices documents and investigates an aural and oral turn in digital communication and media culture in the last decade. Born-written media like newspapers, books, letters, notes, e-mails, and text messages, are presently experiencing a surprising popularity in digital audio versions and offer a convenient and effective way to communicate in everyday life compared to encoding and decoding visual letters. Social and cultural implications following from ear-reading and voice-writing are critically discussed in relation to concepts like a ‘polyphonic public’ and a ‘resonant democracy’. The monograph is also an international consolidation of the research field of audio media in media- and communication studies.