Another dot in the blogosphere?

Changing the way we read and write

Posted on: April 20, 2012

what am i reading? by jamelah, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License  by  jamelah 

I liked reading How We Will Read, an interview with Clay Shirky. There are lots of takeaways, but my favourite quote was: Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the solution. Anyone who is an agent for change will  relate to that statement.

If a newspaper publisher wants to keep selling papers, it will not encourage citizen journalism or cannibalize its sales with iPad versions of its paper. If a university wants to promote only its on-campus experience, it will not venture into the online realm.

But back to changes to the way we read and write…

Shirky made a good point that publishing had already changed (you can do it at the click of a button). My thinking out loud here is evidence of that for crying out loud! And that is just one way writing has changed: It can be more public.

Reading has changed to include the processing of images, sounds, and videos. I think Shirky hinted at that. But he made a more obvious statement about reading being more social. Not social as in book club, but as in shared bookmarks, highlights, annotations, and comments. I had similar thoughts when I wrote about the levels or evolution of e-books.

So the reader is not just a consumer but a participant, a critic, a consultant, and a producer. What’s not to love about reading in the early 21st century? But again I have to ask: Are we teaching kids to read this way?

Tags: , ,

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Archives

Usage policy

%d bloggers like this:
https://ashleytan.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/changing-the-way-we-read-and-write/
ashleytan.wordpress.com
CC-MAIN-2023-23
108644
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:MIXD7EYQLVDV4NJV65XB46SWZSJYLMTO
<urn:uuid:513497b5-a6c6-4ef7-8c99-13637df6ebf5>
2023-05-31T17:19:28Z
192.0.78.12
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:36WJQMRWKJUOG6QVL3SUIA5YEEPL6BCO
<urn:uuid:bb1610e0-4539-449f-a15f-55e84f718177>
https://ashleytan.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/changing-the-way-we-read-and-write/
response
<urn:uuid:4c62c36c-4464-4f5a-9624-95bf71196231>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2023-23
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May/June 2023
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-129
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/