Reading...

Nowadays you hear people talk a lot about how the youth doesn’t read as much as it did back some years ago, and its true, but I’d like to elaborate on this a bit more.

First, years ago we didn’t have stuff like TV, movies, video games and the internet; things that years ago would be novels or books are now adapted into movies, so the problem is that this new forms of entertainment have knocked reading a bit back, is this harmful? You might say that the entertainment communicated by this means is harmful, and I won’t argue with that, there are some very harmful things on TV, movies and the internet just gets the biggest mention on this one; but then again, there are several thousands of harmful books. I believe that it’s not the means on which the message is delivered that’s wrong, but the message itself. Humans have a way of forgetting history, look back at the past and you will see that there were thousands of crimes and horrifying things done by humanity back then, you see human condition doesn’t change, our technology does but you cant block the evil by limiting the media we intake this human product.

But there is a reason TV and cinema are so much popular than books, I believe this is because they are fast, no matter how you see it reading a book takes much longer than watching a TV show or movie. Society accelerates every day even more, that’s no shock, what’s wrong with that? Take away all of the different issues with the content and you’ll see that there’s no problem with it.

Maybe my personal example is not too relevant seeing how I’m not that much of a normal person in more than one aspect, but seeing how you are reading this, what I’m about to talk may apply to you too. I read a lot of stuff in the internet, articles, news, blogs and even stories or poems (and comics of course hehe) so maybe we’re not quite considering how information moves this days, a lot of text can be found in the internet (regardless of content) that people enjoy reading, and yet in all those “Youth doesn’t read stuff” I have never ever seen them mention this humongous quantity of different texts on the internet. What I’m saying is this people who grade us on the books we read every year or such don’t seem to get with the program, they still confuse reading with culture, people who don’t read a newspaper or a magazine or read one or two books a year still might have ample culture, it just comes from more modern sources.