In the March issue of The Calgary Journal the Focus section deals with the advantages of reading also touching on the positive impact reading has on literacy. There's a nice article on Bookcrossing which I have referred to in an earlier blog . The link can be found under resources.
Project Update: It's now been just over two months since I initiated The Hobo Tomes Project. There are 26 books out there tramping around the US and Canada. So far I have only 1 person contact me to let me know that they have adopted a book. Follow up on most of the locations where books were left indicate that the books have been taken in by someone. If you have one of these books please contact me at the e-mail address on the sticker. Six books are heading off to Japan and other countries in that area next week. Also next week 3 more tomes will be off to sunny Mexico to fun in the sun. If you have any feedback please enter it in the comment box below the post. I'm just finishing up a pretty interesting book called "A History Of Reading" by Alberto Manguel. It's a good historical analysis of what it means and how we came to be readers of words. This is one book I won't part with anytime soon. The chapter called "Metaphors of Reading" was one of my favourites.
One of the reasons I started this blog centred around this nagging feeling that something wasn't right about how information was being disseminated throughout society. It seems to me that we and the social groups we belong to are increasingly becoming dependent on visual sets of cues with little or no written words of explanation. I find this particularly prominent within the digital world where e-mails messages are full of symbols such as smiley faces to indicate happiness, acronyms for short phrase LOL, where facebook is a giant photo album where one picture can invoke an entire short story of one's life. Let alone youtube where users up load videos of themselves exposing their darkest secrets or hoping to be discovered and where fifteen minutes of fame is just around the digital corner. Let's not forget Twitter where 140 characters is all you're aloud to get your point across. No longer is it necessary or even acceptable to eloquently express oneself to others for fear of infringing too long on their precious time. Because it is time and our supposed lack thereof that drives us to demand quick images that are easier to interpret and ask for shorter sentences supposedly packed with information so as not to delay or slow us from our next task. What does this all mean for the act of reading? Will we eventually as a society move away from reading as an act of learning and leisure? Something to invigorate our minds with untold interpretations of the same words by so many others and where these differing opinions enter into a dialogue from which new and exciting ideas emerge. Can this occur within the context of the digital world which seems to be ever so much progressively dominating our cultural milieu. As much as I see these various digital forms as necessary and worthwhile tools I can't help getting that nagging feeling every time I use one of these tools that it's taking away, possibly forever, my ability to dedicate the needed time for reading. From this I can't help wandering what the future of reading will be.
I would like to invite everyone who reads this post to engage in dialogue on the "future of reading". You can join the conversation on The Hobo Tomes facebook page. Just enter the discussion section where I will post the question or if you want to post a comment you can do that here underneath this post.
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