{"id":334,"date":"2010-03-10T08:08:55","date_gmt":"2010-03-10T14:08:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sebersole.wordpress.com\/?p=334"},"modified":"2010-03-10T08:08:55","modified_gmt":"2010-03-10T14:08:55","slug":"why-dont-millennials-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ebersolemedia.com\/blog\/why-dont-millennials-read\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Don’t Millennials Read?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The publishing industry is facing some daunting facts about the reading habits of Millennials–i.e., people born during the decades of the 1980s and 90s. The fact is, they don’t care much for reading. While reading books and other literature has been steadily dropping for all age groups, the drop has been most pronounced for this particular demographic. My colleagues at CSU-Pueblo and at other colleges and universities are worried that text books and academic journals will no longer hold the importance that they once held for the transmission of information and knowledge from one generation to the next. An anonymous survey of students in my Media & Society class, midway through the semester, indicated that students had read, on average, about 34% of the assigned reading. Is this cause for alarm, or is it just the new reality that we must simply accept and move on?<\/p>\n

Before you answer, consider the perspective offered by Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University. In the book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future<\/a><\/em>, Bauerlein argues that the distractions of the internet age make it especially difficult for teens and young adults to focus on the kind of knowledge that is critical to the sustenance of democratic society. Without foundational understanding of history and the arts and a working knowledge of the world of politics, economics, and science, young people will be unable to participate in, and contribute to, the advance of civilization. And how is most of this knowledge and understanding acquired?…by reading books and other documents that wrestle with these weighty issues. This is not the kind of information that one gains by perusing Wikipedia or by skimming the Cliff Notes versions of classic texts. And it is certainly not the type of conversation that happens in MySpace or on Facebook.<\/p>\n

Okay, I’m sure that I’ve pushed more than a few of your buttons. Tell me what you think and why I shouldn’t join Bauerlein in his pessimistic assessment of the next generation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The publishing industry is facing some daunting facts about the reading habits of Millennials–i.e., people born during the decades of the 1980s and 90s. The fact is, they don’t care much for reading. While reading books and other literature has been steadily dropping for all age groups, the drop has been most pronounced for this … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Why Don’t Millennials Read?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,16,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-effects","category-new-media","category-print"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebersolemedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebersolemedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebersolemedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebersolemedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebersolemedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ebersolemedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebersolemedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebersolemedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebersolemedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}