I received an email from an old friend in response to this post: Tesseracts, verses, IT.
The email was in no way confrontational, though she shared with me insight that I might not have had the requisite knowledge. I appreciate the insight, and I believe it is valuable, especially if it is provocative, informative and points to a reasonable conversation about the issue - which it did.
Here's the rub. This was pointed out:
while the social perception is that US youth readership of books has been on the decline, that is not necessarily the case. The latest NEA survey indicated a rise in book readership and there is additional research that while youth are indeed more inclined to interact with (read) social media and the Internet is a primary medium for reading for those who have access to technology, traditional print books are still read by many youth. They may not be the books we commonly think of or books that we wish they would read, but books are being read. I realize that wasn't the point of your post, but thought I'd share a little bit of information.
She is absolutely right, that wasn't the point of the post, as well as I am flattered that it was read at all and that it was replied to. But the fact remains that I had to 'google' what the NEA was, because, well, because I didn't know. And I was relying on a reply with some more on the topic, being that I was interested.
The bottom line is Social Media and the internet aren't a 'substitute' for a book, nor are they the destruction of books, but because of the rapid advancement of technology, the way information is consumed, transferred and read is changing. There have been countless studies about how people read 'differently' online.
But, it seems to me, like the mere fact that blogs, social media and the internet are a bit, how shall I say... sensitive? I don't know, really. But I do know that just about every single industry I know of has been marginalized by the Wold Wide Web. The question becomes, I think, not how do we stop it, but how do we use it to our advantage.
So, what happens if you don't embrace this paradigm shift? You and I still have our books, right? I have mine and everytime I move somewhere they are HEAVY (and I'm not getting rid of them).
I have no expertise in academia, but I do read a lot. Sometimes it's a book, but more often than not, it's online. And if I don't have time to do either, I'll listen to a book - on my iPhone, which (incidentally) has an additional 16 gigabytes (the low end model) which I could put my entire book collection on. The reason is quite simple. I can get real-time information from varied sources that is updated by the nanosecond. . . and if I don't know what something is, (i.e. the NEA), I google it and keep reading.
Also - I would read this interesting article about Eye tracking by Laura Ruel and Nora Paul. I found it interesting, anyway.
