Hands stained by the newspaper

I find myself in a quandary. I was looking through NPR today to finally figure out what station it is in Bloomington Normal and came across an interesting article. This article invoked a sense of dread in me that I couldn't place until just now.

Growing up - if I wasn't playing, at school, doing chores, or practicing piano - there was a high chance that I was reading. Reading was always encouraged in our house and the folks never had a problem taking us to the library, or trusting us to ride our bikes the four blocks that the stood between us and the escape that literature provided. Kate and I were read to nearly every single night when we were too young to read for ourselves, which was not a large window but an important one none-the-less. I say that this window is important because I don't know how Kate or I would have turned out if it were not for learning how to read at an early age.

Nowadays children are given to the moving picture box in sacrifice for a parent's personal time. They are given electronics and technologies that I yearned for growing up, but accepted the fact that money was tight, and my friends were always willing to share. I can remember riding my bike for half an hour to my best friend's house and we would play a video game for all of 10 minutes before going outside and doing something fun. Yet, in my mind I always was going there to play the video game, that was until I realized how boring it was.

Then I purchased my first video game console just before going to high school. I thought I was the top dog on the food chain because I could talk with friends who had a PlayStation for 5 years and were unarguably the coolest kids in the class. But...because I purchased the PlayStation, I couldn't afford any games. Smart planning on my part. So I got a job mowing lawns, problem with that was that between baseball, basketball, volleyball, working, and school (depending on the season), I never had time to play the games that worked so hard to buy. In addition to that, I had bought the PlayStation second hand, and it was a seven year old system which of course promptly broke, and I was out of luck. Yet throughout all this I always stayed up late with a flashlight so that I could keep reading after the "lights out!" call.

The thought that struck me while reading this article is that, it seems ridiculous to me that print media will be "laid to bed". Even though I'm living the frugal lifestyle I still find the money to buy the Sunday newspaper, and I'll steal a newspaper out of student union and read it between classes. Now maybe this is just because of my history with the written word, but wouldn't a person rather take your own time to get through the news then get it in 2-5 minute segments?

I can remember in English class with Mr. Beck, dreading sentence diagramming. I wonder if students even do that in classrooms today? Do they diagram sentences found in The Diary of Anne Frank like we did? Or do they diagram text messages that the teacher took off their phone? How do you diagram "wht r u doin 2nite"? Where do you start?

For this reason alone...the fact that the further we go from print media the more we lose ourselves to a fast paced monotonous lifestyle. When we listen to Oprah to find out what to read instead of picking up a book and actually thinking about it while and after reading it. We lose the ability to think for ourselves, and how to respond appropriately, or even how to communicate properly.

Can't this thought be applied to print media for news? Yes, there are quicker ways to acquire knowledge on what's going on in the world than reading about it the next day in the paper. But nations ran fine prior to the telegraph, prior to the phone, prior to the radio, prior to the TV, prior to cell phone, prior to instant updates on said cell phone. Yes, I will concede that with slower moving lines of communication decisions can not be reached as quickly. But given the way the country is now, maybe that would be a good thing.

Perhaps, I'm just old fashioned. Perhaps because I'm from the Midwest I like to digest information before acting on it. Perhaps because I like to form my own opinions about what matters to me, I'm backwards.

I like to think that because of these qualities, I'm a better person.

Thoughts?