I witness this every year.

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre's Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies page 19.

When I teach Jane Austen, I pause over a description of the Bennett sisters' hearing the sound of horses' hooves a mile away and ask students to try to imagine the ambient silences of the early nineteenth century, where sounds were discrete and distinct, and the sounds of the natural world were not obscured by white noise. The point is this: because they hear so many words so constantly, their capacities to savor words - to pause over them, ponder them, reflect upon them, hear the echoes of ancient cadences, and attune themselves to allusiveness and alliteration - are eroding. I witness this every year.