It's routinely entertaining (and a little disheartening) to hear the old guard at the annual PubWest conference bellyache about how these kids today aren't reading and instead are playing video games and messing around online.
At the conference this past November, the closing plenary session recruited some high school and college age kids to talk about how they read. I was curious about the session, thinking it might be a bit like a focus group. As it was a book publishing conference, the recruits were, unfortunately, self-selected heavy readers and current or future English majors. (They were all female, and two were daughters of a conference attendee.)
To be fair, the conference has become increasingly web friendly over the past two years, in part because of excellent keynote speeches from Kevin Smokler of BookTour.com and Andrew Savikas, from O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference.
Yet the entrenched wisdom among those who have been in publishing since before the Mac is that those intertubes are a waste of time for kids.
University of California Berkeley to the rescue! The Digital Youth Research project finds social and educational value to all those "OMG"s and "LOL"s and even "ROTFLMAO"s. If you are one of publishing's old codgery coots and somehow read this blog post, check out what those hippies from Berkeley have to say about the web. Not one for white papers and executive summaries? Turn, then, to the Old Gray Lady's take on the subject (online, natch, not in print).
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