Greg starts out this blogging endeavor with a post about reading. There are a number of ideas mingled in the post from computer technology making information more readily available to the fact that there is so much information out there. “And,” says Greg, “it’s because there is so much to do on a computer that people are straying away from books and other print media.”
I am not anti-book by any means. I majored in English literature as an undergraduate student myself because I love books. I move boxes of them with what seems like annual moves, and even worse my husband has art books. Do you know how heavy those books are? Another caveat, not only do we have tons of books, but my husband is a printmaker. In other words, paper-based things go on at home. But equating with the content of books with the need to read words on a page is missing the point. The recently released Amazon Kindle is one of the steps we are making as a society towards digital distribution of the written word. Is a book less of a book if it is distributed electronically?
The message I am really getting from Greg’s post is this: The type of reading where one person engages quietly and reflectively with a text *might* best be experienced with a printed page. There are so many distractions in our daily lives that it is not just the literary engagement with the text that is important, it is developing an attention span to engage with something that lasts more than 30 seconds.
