More Media, Less Reading.

In 1955 researchers began to ask people to keep diaries of how they spent every ten minutes of their free time. Reading on weekday evenings and weekends fell from five hours a week to 3.6, while television watching rose from about ten minutes a week to more than ten hours.

In fact nowadays we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago.

People are now fed by the different ways of social networks: face book, twitter, Wiki leaks, or YouTube and in a world filled with technology and new innovations it became difficult to do a great intellectual activity in isolation. I always thought that spending several times in front of my computer reduced my focus and therefore it become difficult for me to read a book and stay focused on it for a long period of time unlike what I used to do while I didn’t had a personal computer. I used to enjoy reading without being interrupted by anything on my screen.

News, games and information are now reshaped on-line, and teenagers are more concerned about gossip and celebrities rather than what is happening in the world. Most of the media that is surrounding our generation do not promote knowledge and education «I’m not hearing of a dramatically big drop, but I would say the number of serious readers, the kids who used to come in and get 20 and 30 books - we're just not seeing that," said Caroline Ward, a children's librarian in Stamford.

Indeed, most of children now feel that reading is a duty and read only when something is assigned to them. Our generation did somehow lose the pleasure of reading.

I think that the most striking point is that reading is linked with other forms of social life; the less people read, the less they are concerned with voting, activism, charity, participation in culture and art which is really a shame. Knowing that reading will continue to fall and watching television will continue to rise; professors and parents should really start having a conversation with the kids before the media speaks to them.