The End of Literacy? Don't Stop Reading.

I'm moving house this week and with that comes the necessary and tedious task of putting away the books into boxes. While getting ready to leave for work today, I decided that it was better for me to send back some of the library books I'd borrowed before moving. The only challenge was that I've had these books since early Januaary and haven't gone halfway with any! Still they will have to be returned. My default thinking is that I need to consume & process the daily feed from the web, TV and newspapers as the books will always be there anyway. This thinking needs to be challenged.
Then, during my lunch break, I came across an article by Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor of the Multiple Intelligences fame. In the brilliant Washington Post piece he makes the case that books may not always be here.

Two aspects of the traditional book may be in jeopardy, however. One is the author's capacity to lay out a complex argument, which requires the reader to study and reread, following a circuitous course of reasoning. The Web's speedy browsing may make it difficult for digital natives to master Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" (not that it was ever easy).
The other is the book's special genius for allowing readers to enter a private world for hours or even days at a time. Many of us enjoyed long summer days or solitary train rides when we first discovered an author who spoke directly to us. Nowadays, as clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle has pointed out, young people seem to have a compulsion to stay in touch with one another all the time; periods of lonely silence or privacy seem toxic. If this lust for 24/7 online networking continues, one of the dividends of book reading may fade away. The wealth of different literacies and the ease of moving among them -- on an iPhone for example -- may undermine the once-hallowed status of books.

The ability to achieve a fine balancing act in making sense of information and improving literacy will be to think of and adapt to media as they were, are and will be.

In Prof. Garner's words, "maybe there's a technology, just waiting to be invented, that will help us acquire this invaluable cognitive power"

I really hope there is.

Note: The title of this post was borrowed from Howard Gardner