[caption id="attachment_4422" align="alignleft" width="239" caption="Steven Erikson reading a book"]
[/caption]Carol Forsloff - Education Nation tells us reading is no longer fundamental, and that observation is reinforced by social media where people read their news and current events as just the bytes and bits from social media, Facebook and Twitter.
This practice of reading just the entries of article posts on Facebook and Twitter is becoming more and more common, as in keeping track of visitors through a special software, the observation is that the number of upvotes from Facebook, approving or enjoying an article, is significantly more than the actual number of individuals reading the article or visiting the site.
While Facebook and Twitter have the upvote image, like websites these days, the upvotes don't translate into more reading. What it actually does is feed the lack of reading that educators mourn.
As time becomes less used for reading, what is done with our time. It turns out that in tracking Facebook interaction, many people spend much of their time interacting on social media. This also means reading in small bits and bytes, which doesn't aid comprehension or cognitive skills. In fact, experts say that with the vast information available, our abilities to read, understand what we read, and progress as a culture may in fact be diminishing with this sort of thing.
So the solution, that those in the education nation maintain, is to set aside time for actually reading whole information, stories and material that adds relevancy to what's being said. To not do so often means a partial message, when it's the whole material that provides the serious message, that is not being read much of the time.
