Original article by the New York Times:
Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
The Simses of Old Greenwich, Conn., gather to read after dinner. Their means of text delivery is divided by generation.
BEREA, Ohio Books are not Nadia Konyk’s thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings them home from the library, but Nadia rarely shows an interest.
Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of the computer here in this suburb southwest of Cleveland.
A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.
Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”
(Read the article)
Suddenly and without warning, on a bright day in September almost seven years ago, two airliners crashed into the twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center, leaving devastating destruction and death. In Washington, D.C., and in Pennsylvania, two other airliners came down, also as a result of a terrorist plot. These tragedies snuffed out the lives of thousands of men, women, and children. (Read the article)