How Do You Read?

I haven't had a chance to read the Atlantic article, "Is Google Making us Stupid", so I don't know if Nicholas Carr (the author) thinks he's invented the wheel, but this general discussion thread (technology and reading; not so much the stupidity part) has been going on for a long time. In technology years, anyway.

See "In So Many Words: How Technology is Changing the Reading Habit", American Demographics, March 1997.

Excerpts:

Fears that the Internet and other technologies will cause the decline and fall of print media are probably not warranted. Although people aren't reading as many books as they used to, their thirst for information seems limitless. Publishers who enhance the reading experience with electronic media may find the next generation of customers as literature as any they've ever seen.

"Media is not a zero sum game," says Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, California. "Just because a new medium arrives doesn't mean an old medium dies out. We still have writing in an age of word processing, we still have reading in an age of video. That will continue, but the nature of reading will change as it has changed all along."

Children who are read to by adults often start reading earlier and are more likely to develop a lifelong love of reading. Thirty-one percent of children who were read to by their parents learned to read before age 6, compared with 12 percent of those who were not read to, according to a 1990 Gallup study.

American Demographics had been on my required reading list for years until its demise in November 2004. I still miss it.