Having been to this weeks lecture, i found it really interesting to listen what Dave had to say about Sonia Livingstone and how she questions whether reading is the same as reading used to be?
However i don't think that should be the question i just think that now there are two types of reading traditional reading and the new media reading. As i am reading a book at the moment, as everyone knows, you just read along the book and you have to read it page by page until you come to the end. That is pretty much it. However, when you are reading on the internet you have hyperlinks that can take you everywhere on the internet. They are non linear, you can hop around, it becomes your choice as to whether you stay reading this website or you decided to venture on to another. This then makes us become produsers - we are a producer of meaning and a user of websites. In addition, when you are reading a book, in the past if you would of had a particular question about the book and wanted to get in contact with the author, it would be a case of writing to them and waiting (probably for a long time) for an answer. However, these days if you are reading something on the internet you would be able to contact the writer via email, and it would be easier for the writer to email back to you. Not only would it be easier but also faster.
In addition to the new reading, you have the new literacy that the new media comes with. I believe that the internet is put in place to be a quick and easy solution for everybody to access information, and with this a new literacy has come with it. Because the hypertext takes you all over the place - do you need a new sort of literacy to make the best of media? I think in terms of the younger generation using the internet, i believe that this is the case. As a teen i grew up with MSN messenger and as time went by i found my peers and i using this new type of literacy More often. things like brb - be right back and lol - laughing out loud. It allowed us to reply back quicker and share our emotions easier than having to explain that we were actually laughing out loud. Not only is that the case for MSN but for texting too. Because i have grown up with it, i feel myself writing like that in formal emails etc. In addition, i remember hearing on the news that someschool children were starting to write like that in their exams. It makes me think that when the now younger generation becomes the older generation will this new literacy take over the traditional English, or will a new literacy start?
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I think that with any book, you automatically look for the information that you need. Unless the book is for entertainment you are going to skim through the pages until you find the information that you need. This is the same for the internet, you will carry on through pages and links until you find what you want. By doing this it opens new windows are widens the information that you can find, compared to the limitation of one book. I think that this is a basic way of finding information, but this way isn't as 'solid' as finding quotes in books and quoting them in essays. E books allows you to read books digitally and you can search throughout for the infomration that you need. You don't really need a new literacy to read them, just the format is different, and if your from our generation it is something we are used to rather than having to pick it up.
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