RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE: Burdened By Books.

Though I had read about our new age of orality, my students made it existential. The absence of punctuation and attrition of meaning, the spinning of word salads and splintering of sentences in their papers read like transcripts from their online lives. . . .

It was not just, say, the weirdness of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, the thickness of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, or the otherness of Camus’s The Stranger. Instead, their difficulty seems to reside in the act of spending time alone with an open book in their hands.

Faced by this difficulty, students told me that they listen to audio recordings of the book as they read. The sound of the words, it seems, helps them grasp the sense of the words.

Well, that’s how it works when you can’t really read. I have some discussion of how this has happened in my The Social Media Upheaval.

Related: The beginning of silent reading changed Westerners’ interior life.