Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?

[groovedaddy]

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.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?th&emc=th

[Donnachaidh]

1. I certainly hope her daughter isn't planning on going to college

Surfing websites like YouTube is NOT reading, and does nothing to prepare HS students for the massive amounts of reading they will be required to do in college.

Perhaps Mother needs to have her kid take a literacy test. She'd be surprised at how many teens are functionally illiterate these days.