Our next assignment in IT was to create a podcast interviewing a fictional teenager, living in Mongolia. This is practice for our final product, which is a full length podcast on adolescence. We had to choose one area that has changed between teenagers nowadays and their parents, and my choice was reading.
With all of the other things that have changed, the differences in the way we see books nowadays and the way we did 30 years ago go unnoticed. Even though books have remained somewhat the same, there have been lots of subtle variations that I thought were interesting to discuss. Reading is something I'm interested in, so I had a fun time writing this script. It was also interesting to make up a character (felt like a character from a book, from that matter).
I edited my recording in Audacity, using various tools such as Noise Removal, Sound Amplify and Pitch Change (I didn't want it to sound like my voice). When I converted it to an MP3, though, the sound quality became flawed and since I can't upload it to Blogger anyway, here is the script:
Name: Lily
Age: 16
Gender: Girl
Cultural background: Lily lived in England from the time she was born to her twelfth birthday, after which she moved abroad to Mongolia. Culturally, she considers herself British, but she has travelled a lot and would like to believe she has an “international culture.” She is the second eldest in a family of three. Her little sister is turning nine and her older brother is in his sophomore year of university.
Education: Lily goes to ISU, but she has also been in a boarding school and a typical school back in England. She isn’t sure about her career path yet, but is considering teaching. She is somewhat of a good student, but has other interests.
Hobbies, interests: Lily loves reading and writing stories, as well as “hands and crafts” activities.
If you ask people what has changed over the last thirty years, most teenagers probably wouldn’t answer “reading.” I mean, books are still books, right? They’re just one of these things that shouldn’t ever change all that much, but even though the books didn’t change that much, people think about them a little differently now.
I think that as far as the books themselves go, teenagers have a lot more of them these days. It doesn’t mean they read more, but they definitely own more books. Some of my friends like libraries, but most of them would rather go to a bookstore and get to keep the book, even if that means they have less to read in the end. But that’s less of a problem as well, because usually it’s our parents that buy our books. My mom always sighs a little when she sees the price after shopping in a bookstore, but she still pays. When she was a teenager, she had to save up her pocket money if she wanted to buy something new to read – I guess that’s why she used the library more. It’s also a lot harder when you live abroad. There aren’t that many books available in your language, so your book shopping is mostly done on Amazon, which just isn’t the same.
The stuff that teenagers read is also pretty different. Before, you had children’s books when you were a kid and then you jumped into the classics. These days, we have young adult novels in the middle. These are books that were actually written for teenagers, and you can feel the difference. The plots try to appeal to us, the storyline is more complicated than in the children’s books but the language is easier to follow than in literature. I don’t know how great that is. Before, people jumped straight from kids books to classics, and they seemed to do fine, right? But then, lots of adults I know stopped reading when they grew up. So even though it’s a little hard to tell for now, I think that maybe the young adult novels will keep kids reading for longer.
And then, obviously technology has changed the way we see books. There’s new devices like a Kindle that pretty much replace books altogether, but I think most of the teens I know prefer paperbacks. There’s just something about holding a book that e-books have a hard time replacing, so that’s not been too much of a change yet. But I think the way you see a book is more…interactive nowadays. When you’re done with a book, you don’t just put it down and maybe talk about it with your friends, like you did 30 years ago. You go on the internet and discuss the book on web boards; you join groups on Facebook; you can even go write another version of the story or read what other fans wrote on websites like Fanfiction.net. And for books that you read at school and have to analyze, you can look up the entire plot, the meanings, the symbols used in the book on other websites like Sparknotes.
The internet, though, is making us pay less and less attention to what we read. Now you just browse a website and go from link to link; you don’t read the text that much, you quickly look at it to get an essential idea of what it’s saying. I think this new way of reading also transferred to paperbacks – lots of people would rather read a magazine than a story. It’s just simpler, it takes less time, and I guess you can’t really deny that teenagers these days want to do many more things at once. Are all of these changes good for reading? It’s hard to tell yet, but it’s impossible to stop change once it has started…
"Open books." 2009. MPL. 19 Nov 2009 <"http://blog.mpl.org/nowatmpl/books1.jpg">
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