Sept 29th readings

The readings this week made me want to sit down and read to my kids.  I know how important literacy and reading, in all its forms, is. Some of the statistics in the articles were a little shocking to me. People in the US watching 27-30 hours of TV a week (21 Ross), as well as finding that literacy skills aren’t actually declining.

One point in “The Company of Readers” was that throughout history, whenever the way we read has changed, people have assumed that reading would be changed for the worse. Socrates believed that the written word was not as good as the spoken word. Printing presses made the written word more available, but people felt the “quality” of mass produced literature was sub-par. This relates to the topic of e-readers my group will be presenting on. Are they a good thing? How will they change the way we read? What about blogs? Social networking sites? Many people think that doing much of our reading on the internet will lead to decreased literacy skills, but apparently so far, it has not.

This article seemed to be saying that any reading is good reading. While I agree with that, I still think some reading is better than others. It’s hard to learn how to think critically about something you have read when it is 2 sentences long.  I’m not saying the only good reading is a 1000 page tome on a scientific subject, but there is certainly more value in some things than in others.  As librarians, it is not our job to judge too harshly when making choices of what to add to collections or what to recommend to patrons. I think this will be a hard line to walk, finding reading materials that I personally think are not the best choices.

The Pawley article was interesting in that she was talking about the difference between writers and readers, and how they are viewed by different schools of thought. The thought I kept returning to as I read this article, was that the line is continually blurring. Take our blogs as an example, we can write about what we have read, and publish it for anyone to see. Does that make us readers or writers? We’re both, and I think that the division between readers and writers will continue to shrink.

She also talked a lot about the importance of the “middle layer” in reading. Meaning reading materials that come from somewhere other than a traditional publisher. Reading materials from a church, or a book club, or an ethnically centered group.  I never thought about the distinction between these types of reading materials before, but essentially publishers are commercially driven, and other types of organizations, presumably, are not. This will make a difference in what types of writing they publish, especially about topics that are not currently popular.