An interesting debate provided by The New York Times:
. . .some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.
But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.
“Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading,” by Motoko Rich (The New York Times)
The debate also reminds me of a quote by Vonnegut, an author who oftentimes delighted in writing about the future of technology, even if it was usually composed on his old, trustworthy typewriter using the two finger, “find and peck” method of typing:
“By accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.”
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I like how Rich (the author) includes those statistics on declining reading at the end of the first page; it reminds me of a billboard I used to see when we drove around that said “Read with your child an hour a day.” Over time, that idea of reading an hour a day went down to half an hour, and most recently I saw another ad that said “Read with your child 15 minutes a day.” It’s too bad, I mean what happened to those 45 minutes?