By: Annie Salvador, San Roque National High School, Bulusan, Sorsogon

(1^st Placer, 2^nd Provincewide Science and Technology Online Writing Contest

Coach: Renz Alvin Gabay )

As Eugene Ionesco once put it, “People who don’t read are brutes.”

Reading is one of the activities that sets us apart from animals. We are endowed by faculties to interpret words and form meaningful conjectures which the latter is unable to. Nonetheless, only a few engross into in-depth and productive reading, hardly ever most of the students.

Truly, information technology is one of the greatest scientific inventions which has affected humanity in two folds. It has transcended into almost all aspects of life; information becomes at hand, transactions are made easier and communication is relatively improved. Conversely, in an article by Kori Morgan http://oureverydaylife.com/effects-internet-reading-skills, he stressed out the negative role the social media has played on reading skills. The National Endowment for the Arts reports a relationship between the lack of time students spend reading for pleasure and decreased reading scores. Their report “To Read or Not to Read” revealed that more than half of people ages 18 to 24 don’t read for fun and that the same age group is more likely to spend money on entertainment consoles, TVs, video games and other visual entertainment media than books. In possible consequence, overall reading test scores are down nationwide, with only 5 percent of students testing at proficient levels.

The influx of information is so tremendous that we are nearly drowned in a vast ocean of information; thus, it is imperative to do selective reading. Selecting reading means being able to wisely select parts of a material like those found in websites. Skimming and scanning are two forms of selective reading which prove to be important as it is unequivocally impossible to read all of a book’s or a site’s content in one sitting. There is an increasing need for the ability to scan information at a high level and to be highly selective of the areas one wishes to study in detail.

While writing this, there are millions of messages being transmitted across the globe and tons of information being processed and accessed. The social media, illogical as it may sound, can be used to promote reading. Students nowadays are fond of browsing social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and the like to update status and get posted of the occurrences in their social milieu. They spend most of the time browsing networking sites rather than read their books. In addition, they prefer to bring their phones over their books. So, how can social media promote in-depth and productive reading? Several pages are created to provide articles which they can read and react on. When they read these articles, they form ideas and make comparisons. These lead them into in-depth and productive reading by interacting with others, thus a wide array of ideas comes into play. Scientific articles/journals are posted on several social media pages in which students can easily access on. Moreover, some sites can now be accessed even one has no load or data package by going to internet.org, hence making reading more practical.

On the other hand, social media may also strew disadvantages by becoming a platform for viewing shared pornographic pictures and of posts that suggest violence and iniquity. Furthermore, new jargons may be created that negatively correlate with students’ reading and spelling skills, thus a need for personal assessment of contents is necessary.

The social media is replete of various contents that one has to sieve on account that not all of the contents found in them are correct. Some of the contents, even in wikipedia, can be edited by anyone, making the data unreliable. The data can easily be shared in social sites without regard to accuracy. Information contained therein is no longer considered valid for professional writings like in thesis and dissertation. One has to validate the data posted in social media by consulting reliable books. This only means that we cannot completely get rid of books, they are actually very indispensable as learning/reading materials and go hand in hand with the electronic resources.

It entails open-mindedness and perspicacity on students’ part to rightfully plump for those deemed beneficial and do away with those that are detrimental. One has to admit that they cannot go back in time and get rid of social media and all ICT paraphernalia that we have today. Getting rid of social media is not the answer to putting an end to violence and pornography. We have to view it positively, invented for humanity’s improvement of the quality of life and not for its degradation. We have to use our scientific judgment and intelligence in wisely using social media and information technology as a whole.

To end, we are now treading in the twenty first century where reading takes a new form through social media. Man himself has become better from what he was before. As a social animal he is, he is bound to communicate and interact with others and use his faculties to survive.

We must therefore adopt and embrace change!