Hyperspace vs. Hemingway

I am a lit chick i.e. a female who loves reading. As a little kiddo, I thoroughly enjoyed the nights spent with my Mom, reading little golden book stories about Farmer Joe and his rabbits. Soonafter, I progressed into an avid reader of the Goosebumps series by R.L. Stine. And after those got repetitive, I upgraded to Christopher Pike's more "post-pubescent" plots (there were some sex scenes and bad language.) Those books and many others that included topics about aliens, ghosts, and vampires, helped me to become the reader I am today. However, growing up, the only experience I had with online reading was in the yahoo chatrooms that my cousin and I would visit in order to talk to crazy people from Denmark.

I understand that I am an exception. Most of my friends had little to no interest in reading. Getting children to have an interest in reading books has been a problem for a long time, before the access to the internet was as available as it is today. In my case I think my love for books and reading was probably due to the positive attention I got from my mother and teachers for being so interested in literature.

There is no question in my mind that online reading affects literacy in a positive way. I agree with the notion that internet reading could be an avenue toward book reading because they are similar in some ways, but the issues around why kids are not reading books is more complex and should not simply be blamed on the distraction of the internet.

The internet and books are inherently different things and should be treated as so. Books, novels, literature, offer you a window into a drawn-out context of history or situation and allow for more detail, explanation, which in turn offers a chance to reflect on themes and build on imagination. And the internet is a whole different animal. Different medias are plastered together: video, audio, text, to form a story that will communicate information more quickly. But it's a different story altogether, a different way of learning. With the internet, you can receive tons of information in a matter of minutes because of media-combination and the nature of the internet. This doesn't mean that it's better, just different.

In the end, books and internet reading are both beneficial; they just produce different benefits.