... the new yorker: second orality ...
Proust described reading as "that fruitful miracle of a communication in the middle of solitude". According to Maryanne Wolf "The efficient reading brain quite literally has more time to think".
A reader learns about the world and imagines it differently from the way a viewer does. If, over time, many people choose television over books, then a nation's conversation with itself changes.
The concept of the "second orality" is attributed to Walter Ong in the early 1980s who speculated that television was taking us into an era of "second orality" akin to the primary orality that existed before the emergence of text. Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to "think memorable thoughts" whose zing ensures their transmission.
As a child progresses from decoding to fluent reading, the route of signals through the brain shifts and reading starts to move along a faster and more efficient route. With the gain in time and the freed up brain power, a fluent reader is able to integrate more of her own thoughts and feelings into her experience. When reading goes well it is effortless; it makes you smarter because it leaves more of your brain alone. Proust contends that to read is "to receive a communication with another way of thinking, all the while remaining alone and continuing to enjoy the intellectual power that one has in solitude and that conversation dissipates immediately".
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