by Shawn Yoo

Created on: December 25, 2008

If you're anything like the typical 20-something college student, you probably get plenty of information online. We have RSS feeds to inform us about the latest posts on our favorite blogs and sites like digg.com and reddit.com to inform us about what's hot in the world today. If we need to find a good local restaurant, we go to yelp.com and read the reviews. If we're not sure what presents we should get for our parents, we can just google search "gift ideas for parents" and bam! - 9,530,000 results! In fact, our first resource for anything is probably the internet - and why shouldn't it? The web is the greatest accumulation of knowledge that has ever existed. Nearly anything you might want to find out, from "What sex offenders are their in my neighborhood?"(familywatchdog.com) to "What's the world record for longest leg hair?" (4.88 in) is on the internet.

But hold on- here's something shocking - some people, such as Pulitzer Prize winner, Dave McCullough, and N.E.A. chairman, Dana Giola, actually have the audacity to suggest that the internet has a negative effect on our reading? When I first heard about it, i couldn't believe it either, but before you go off labeling these people as hackneyed old codgers reminiscent of Jack Thompson and his warnings that video and computer games would lead to the desensitization and moral decadence of today's youth, it turns out that their claims can actually be backed by research. The Department of Education reports that the number of 17 year olds who say they read for fun has dropped nearly a third between 2004 and 1984. In addition, authors like Nicholas Carr point out the fact that, and I'm sure you've experienced this too, reading for long periods of time has become more and more difficult, personally. If you were researching for a paper and stumbled upon a long page, you'd probably ctrl+f your way through it. Add to that that the majority of teen/pre-teen emails, IMs, and texts l0ok leik dis, the case that the internet hinders our English doesn't seem so far-fetched.

But wait; surely, there's another side to this argument? After all, isn't most of the time you spend on the internet spent doing reading of some sort, and since the average time spend on the internet per day has indisputably increased, hasn't the amount of reading done on average increased rather than decreased? In sense, one could then argue that the internet has brought about a surge in the interest of reading among youngsters, considering they might spend up to 6 hours online regularly. What about the worry that the internet leads to poorer English skills? Research done through the HomeNetToo Project by Michigan State University shows that children who spent more time online had a higher GPA and did better on the reading sections of standardized tests.

Whatever your views on the subject, there's no denying that the internet has had some sort of effect on our reading. Is just a phase that our society is going through or a total change in how we think? Only time will tell.

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