Slow reading or no reading...

Is it possible to read a whole article on-line? The Guardian recently featured an article about slow reading,  encouraging us to slow down, and relax with the printed word. Many Academics are frustrated with under-graduates that appear to skim read books or google keywords.

Technology is commonly blamed for this modern phenomenon. Text messaging and more recently Twitter have taught us to confine our reading to one or two sentences, worse still to completly ignore grammar and therefore poorly communicate true feelings or manage to inspire others. Reading on-line is hard with constant adverts, pop ups, hyperlinks and distractions. If you're still reading this article, well done: you're doing better than some.

So, in the future will our children grow up with minds full of useless bite-sized trivia loosely associated by keywords, or will great thinkers, being both well-read and patient listeners, persist? The Guardian concludes that while technology is the route cause of the problem, Apple's iPad may well be the first piece of technology to reverse the trend by introducing traditional text to a new generation. 

I lent my iPad to the National Trust for use at the Hay Festival this year and based on the crowds of bookworms gathered around, keen to try the iPad for themselves, perhaps future generations will continue to put their feet up and relax slow reading. A home without an overstocked bookcase still seems a somewhat sterile environment to me. Let's just hope the iPad is responsible for avid book collectors of the future.