A leitura na era digital

Recentemente fiz um trabalho sobre os hábitos de leitura dos portugueses e interroguei-me pessoalmente sobre esta questão de qual o papel e o lugar da leitura na era da Internet e das mensagens escritas. Gostei das respostas que obtive, mas parte de mim receia que o prazer da leitura de um bom livro possa passar a ser descoberto mais raramente. Agora quem levanta mais questões sobre o tema são especialistas americanos.

O artigo
Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?
By MOTOKO RICH
Published: July 27, 2008

BEREA, Ohio — Books are not Nadia Konyk’s thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings them home from the library, but Nadia rarely shows an interest.

Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of the computer here in this suburb southwest of Cleveland.

A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.

Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”

Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.

in The New York Times - Books