Books and Literacy in the Digital Age

This article was chosen based on conviction. The world is technological, and this article questions, should books be as well? The writer talks bout the effect on youth in the age of technology, and what it has done to their attention spans and literacy skills.  What used to be the attention span of a book, became the attention span of a short story, and now is the attention span of a blog. This article gives a good point about the difference in today's teachings.  Can we really expect our children to be readers, when we don't open a book ourselves?  The author talks about reading to our children, which in turn will keep them reading throughout their lives. Schools are not helping either.  Instead of funding libraries they are funding computer labs in a false hope to promote literacy, but it has had no effect in that area. The author states, which we all will agree, that you have to be somewhat literate to navigate on the internet, post blogs, send texts, etc. Is this an advantage in education today?  I don't think so.  As much as you can learn online, there is also a huge part of the internet that is published inaccurately. The next thing the author touches base on is the digital reader.  I know the Kindle, Reader, and Nook have become popular, but to me there is nothing better than to Kindle that connection from the author to the Reader in your favorite Nook of the house.  I'd take the smell of a book forgotten over the illumination of a screen any day.  The author tells us how Amazon is already starting to pull copies like Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 from the digital collection.  They even went as far as deleting them from Kindles where they had already been purchased!  The convenience is a plus and libraries have noticed, offering much more than only books; including movies, software, and audio files. Google tried to digitize every book ever printed, and failed.  Not one author wanted their published works readily available online for free, so the only books available are the ones where the copyrights have expired.  This usually takes 95 years after publication.  Although I disagree with the digitizing of books, it is a new way to help build a society of readers again.  I think it will promote literacy in the age of technology, but I still prefer to get lost in the pages of binding. I hope that libraries don’t fade into this new age; we will lose all the history we love.  Besides this new technology has not been around long enough to take over just yet. I agree with the author 100 %; there is nothing like reading a book and smelling its contents, but the world is changing and I think that maybe the digital book is a new way to recruit avid readers.

Do you think libraries will become paler in comparison to digital readers?

Would you rather stare at a luminous screen instead of cracking open a new book?

Do you think that the digitization of books will actually help society become more literate?




LTA103- Sarah Radtke

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