The questions for week three were:
Reading has been associated with achievement, both in school and at work - perhaps more fundamentally, with our capacity for critical analysis and our freedom to express ourselves.
Are we reading less?
What do we stand to lose if this is true?
11 comments:
I don't think we are reading less,but that the mediums that can be read are changing or different from what they were before the Internet. We are reading things all the time in print, on tv, on the Internet. We even "read" signs and wonders in nature and in eachother that don't come in print. Reading is diversifying, not dying!
I think this is brilliant. I submitted my paper from school to the Big Read contest, I want to read other people's thoughts on this book as well.
Yes we are reading fewer books, but commisseratly our consumption of news and opinion-based literature (usually through the internet) has been on the rise. The loss of some amount of fictional literature is more than compensated by the shift in focus to real stories of people and evens which pervade the internet.
With the new ability of anyone to present their concepts and ideas to the global consciousness (usually through outlets such as Blogspot) our consciousness is actually expanding beyond the limiting scope of publishers and traditional news companies.
I agree that reading is diversifying, but I also know that todays youth don't read nearly as much as people have in the past. We live in/ outside of the nations most literate city, Seattle. Even we are noticing a decline in reading books. However I'm not exactly sure whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. It is just a change.
We are reading less books, but i do not consider this to be all bad. unless the flow of information and free speech is tampered with a situation like in Fahrenheit 451 could never happen
i don't really know if reading in america is declining. it is a hard question for me to answer. living on bainbridge everyone reads. my sister is constintly reading book after book. Seattle is considered one of the nations most literate cities, so when asked this question i would have to disagree. i disagree partially due to the fact that i have not been exposed to other schools and communities in america. i know that in other parts of the us reading is not as strong.
This study stated that we are reading less books. This may be true. I know nothing about the reliability of the study, so I won't comment on it. However, if you actually read the book "Fahrenheit 451," you should realize that it isn't really the books that matter, but rather the ideas in them. Faber did say that the people could get the same thing from the "parlors," but the right things weren't being shown. As long as we are all being exposed to a variety of new ideas and are educated enough to decide for ourselves which one is right, then society is fine.
Although reading purely for pleasure is certainly less popular than it was a few decades ago, the aspects of reading which society needs I.E. education, the sharing of ideas, and any sort of political dissent are still brought to us by the internet. Despite the numerous pointless distractions on the internet there is quite a deal of wisdom and intelligent thought to be found.
I believe that we are reading less, but I don’t think that that will necessarily become a problem. In general, I feel that many books are portrayed as more artistic and intellectual then films, when this is not necessarily the case. If reading declines, the population will simply get intellectual stimulation from some other medium. We will simply get dumber because we are reading less.
I don't necessarily think that we're reading less; it's just that we're drawing our reading material from different source. Is reading news online any different from reading the sunday paper? Is reading an email that different from reading a letter? With blogs, forums, and other online communities, sharing inforation is less of a hassle than ever--even if you don't necessarily want to read the information others share. And thanks to the wonders of illegal peer-to-peer file sharing, even the largest and heaviest tome can be transfered into a weightless format able to be stored conveniently on your computer. So no, I don't think it matters that much that we're reading more online than we are in books. Don't get me wrong--I'm an avid book-reader, with a huge collection of literature. If nothing else, it's much easier to curl up in bed with a nice book than it is with a laptop. But still, I see no real problem with using a screen rather than a musty book to do your reading.
personally i tink that poeple and mostly kids are reading much less then the generations before us. back then poeple didnt have much to entertain themselves so they read books, but now we have music TV computers and video games that keep us from reading books.
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