Okay, this has me wondering - and you, standing at the crux of the matter, as it were, can answer.
Are the kids of today abandoning books? (I mean the voluntary, early-to-late teenagers, not the picture lovin' toddler set). I'll even accept readers who lack any taste, such as those who read Twilight and such.
Actually, no. The big ones most people know about these days are the Harry Potter and Twilight series (they’re both popular, that is the only connection I’ll make between them), but there’s more reading going on. In the older kids it does look like the girls are reading more. There’s a shit ton of soapy stuff, kinda like if Gossip Girl and Twilight had a bunch of kids. There’s a new private school, or vampire, or vampire private school series each month it seems. I’m not sure what the guys are doing. The younger ones, boys up to about ninth grade or so, are reading a lot of stuff too. The whole middle school group, boys and girls, has a lot of fiction for it these days and they’re into it. Wimpy Kid, Pendragon, the Georgia Nicholson books are still popular. The Maximum Ride series has male and female fans. And there’s a big, big comics audience. They check out the mangas by the ton, but I know they’re reading some of the superheroes too, along with me and the dads. So don’t worry, there is always lots and lots and lots of stuff in the book drop.
Do you think the Internet (which will probably continue to have a text component until kids work out a set of viable emoticons/pictographs they can say kthanxbai with) is making kids more literate or less?
Posted by: Bigg | July 08, 2009 at 11:03 PM
Naw it won't make 'em less literate, but their damn fool phones *try*.
Posted by: Jay | July 08, 2009 at 11:17 PM