By Steven Johnson
The Gauridian Feb. 7th 2008
According to a study for the National Endowment for the Arts, as our culture focuses more on electronic media, reading is dangerously on the decline. In this article, Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good For You, challenges the NEA study by suggesting that on-screen literacy is not factored into the study. To Johnson, this omission is preposterous. He writes, "Odds are that you are reading these words on a computer monitor. Are you not exercising the same cognitive muscles because these words are made out of pixels and not little splotches of ink?... And of course we are writing more, and writing in public for strangers: novel readers may have declined by 10%, but the number of bloggers has gone from zero to 25 million."
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