Who is Reading Nowadays?

Good news for writers! There is a huge market for children’s books.  Famous comedian Stephen Colbert and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor both have published new children’s books lately.

The children are reading either voluntarily or involuntarily, reading or being read.  It doesn’t matter.  All I know is that they have to buy books, or their parents have to buy books which is good for the writers.  Children are the ones who must learn how to read and have reading assignments.

Reading and writing are apparently still required skills in our modern society.  But who know how long it will last.  Our lives are increasingly taken over by TV images or video images on our TVs or smart phones.   I find myself so much free time on watching YouTube videos that I hardly have time to read anymore.  The only reading I do is to listen to audio books or read the Facebook or Twitter messages.

Yes, we have to write in our social medias like Facebook or Twitter.  But our writing is easy, and it is limited to 280 characters on Twitter.  It is less than 280 on Facebook because nobody will read a message that are longer.  As for Instagram, the preferred method to share is photograph or video.  On Snapchat, they even put on funny glasses or dog ears on the picture of your face or your friend’s face.  It is getting so popular that Snapchat thinks they can sell you cameras that do that.  Inventor Elon Musk even thinks we should communicate via brain waves in the future, so we can exchange data in a speed that rivals Robots.  It might sound advanced and may be necessary for the survival of mankind.  But language is such a great invention and has been around for thousands of years.  Books play such an important role in the advancement of our culture and society, and in the preservation of our history.  Now they are calling it a bottle-neck of human communication.

Writing for me has been like a friend since I was very young and suffering from unusual cruelty in China due to my parent’s disagreement with the government and political background.  Without writing, I wouldn’t have been able to survive.  So please support reading and writing and let this great invention last for another thousand years.

Lisa Wharton

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