Reading in Changing Society

Reading in Changing Society PDF Author: Marju Lauristin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789949325757
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
The changing state of reading and its fate in the digitalised world is one of the core issues in the contemporary debates about the future of culture. The central position of the printed word, and primarily, books as the most valuable cultural medium and the main source of knowledge, are becoming questioned in the age of the Internet. Reading as gateway to the world of fantasies has been challenged by powerful audiovisual media. Is the pleasure of reading as a creative process involving imagination and self-cognition disappearing, and being replaced by the quick exchange of impressions and images in social media? Are these critical notes and concerns about the future of reading just rapid generalisations and misunderstandings, evoked by the invasion of new technologies in the old and well-established world of books?The articles gathered here represent empirical studies, theoretical and historical reflections on the changes in the world of books and reading in the Baltic and Nordic countries, as well as descriptions of the new library practices that reflect the creative efforts to adapt to the changing social and technological environment.

Reading in Changing Society

Reading in Changing Society PDF Author: Marju Lauristin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789949325757
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
The changing state of reading and its fate in the digitalised world is one of the core issues in the contemporary debates about the future of culture. The central position of the printed word, and primarily, books as the most valuable cultural medium and the main source of knowledge, are becoming questioned in the age of the Internet. Reading as gateway to the world of fantasies has been challenged by powerful audiovisual media. Is the pleasure of reading as a creative process involving imagination and self-cognition disappearing, and being replaced by the quick exchange of impressions and images in social media? Are these critical notes and concerns about the future of reading just rapid generalisations and misunderstandings, evoked by the invasion of new technologies in the old and well-established world of books?The articles gathered here represent empirical studies, theoretical and historical reflections on the changes in the world of books and reading in the Baltic and Nordic countries, as well as descriptions of the new library practices that reflect the creative efforts to adapt to the changing social and technological environment.

Changing Society

Changing Society PDF Author: Jerome Schwab
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Longman
ISBN: 9780132379403
Category : Computers and college students
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This thematic reader helps develop writers by exposing them to readings that are immediately relevant to their lives as students, consumers, and citizens, and seeking to awaken social consciousness and encourage involvement. Rich with discussion questions and writing prompts focusing on critical reading and rhetoric, this text explores not only how society is changing, but also how citizens can participate in changing it in the interests of social justice, peace, and preservation of communities and the environment.

The Freedom to Read

The Freedom to Read PDF Author: American Library Association
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Libraries
Languages : en
Pages : 16

Get Book Here

Book Description


Can Education Change Society?

Can Education Change Society? PDF Author: Michael W. Apple
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415875323
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this groundbreaking work, Apple pushes educators toward a more substantial understanding of what schools do and what we can do to challenge the relations of dominance and subordination in the larger society.

The Sibling Society

The Sibling Society PDF Author: Robert Bly
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679781285
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
Where have all the grownups gone? In answering that question with the same freewheeling erudition and intuitive brilliance that made Iron John a national bestseller, poet, storyteller and translator Robert Bly tells us that we live in a "sibling society, " in which adults have regressed into adolescence and adolescents refuse to grow up.

Society and Technological Change

Society and Technological Change PDF Author: Rudi Volti
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780716787327
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description
Provides a comprehensive introduction to the interactions of society and technology. The new fifth edition includes coverage of such timely topics as cloning, stem-cell research, genetically modified foods, terrorism, intellectual property, and the global impact of the internet.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction PDF Author: Alan Jacobs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019983167X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Get Book Here

Book Description
In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way. In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices. Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.

Book Clubs

Book Clubs PDF Author: Elizabeth Long
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226492621
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Get Book Here

Book Description
Book clubs are everywhere these days. And women talk about the clubs they belong to with surprising emotion. But why are the clubs so important to them? And what do the women discuss when they meet? To answer questions like these, Elizabeth Long spent years observing and participating in women's book clubs and interviewing members from different discussion groups. Far from being an isolated activity, she finds reading for club members to be an active and social pursuit, a crucial way for women to reflect creatively on the meaning of their lives and their place in the social order.

Reader, Come Home

Reader, Come Home PDF Author: Maryanne Wolf
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062388797
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
The author of the acclaimed Proust and the Squid follows up with a lively, ambitious, and deeply informative book that considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies. A decade ago, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid revealed what we know about how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we think and feel. Since then, the ways we process written language have changed dramatically with many concerned about both their own changes and that of children. New research on the reading brain chronicles these changes in the brains of children and adults as they learn to read while immersed in a digitally dominated medium. Drawing deeply on this research, this book comprises a series of letters Wolf writes to us—her beloved readers—to describe her concerns and her hopes about what is happening to the reading brain as it unavoidably changes to adapt to digital mediums. Wolf raises difficult questions, including: Will children learn to incorporate the full range of "deep reading" processes that are at the core of the expert reading brain? Will the mix of a seemingly infinite set of distractions for children’s attention and their quick access to immediate, voluminous information alter their ability to think for themselves? With information at their fingertips, will the next generation learn to build their own storehouse of knowledge, which could impede the ability to make analogies and draw inferences from what they know? Will all these influences change the formation in children and the use in adults of "slower" cognitive processes like critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that comprise deep reading and that influence both how we think and how we live our lives? How can we preserve deep reading processes in future iterations of the reading brain? Concerns about attention span, critical reasoning, and over-reliance on technology are never just about children—Wolf herself has found that, though she is a reading expert, her ability to read deeply has been impacted as she has become increasingly dependent on screens. Wolf draws on neuroscience, literature, education, and philosophy and blends historical, literary, and scientific facts with down-to-earth examples and warm anecdotes to illuminate complex ideas that culminate in a proposal for a biliterate reading brain. Provocative and intriguing, Reader, Come Home is a roadmap that provides a cautionary but hopeful perspective on the impact of technology on our brains and our most essential intellectual capacities—and what this could mean for our future.

Climate Change and Society

Climate Change and Society PDF Author: John Urry
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745650376
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the significance of human behaviour to understanding the causes and impacts of changing climates and to assessing varied ways of responding to such changes. So far the discipline that has represented and modelled such human behaviour is economics. By contrast Climate Change and Society tries to place the ‘social’ at the heart of both the analysis of climates and of the assessment of alternative futures. It demonstrates the importance of social practices organised into systems. In the fateful twentieth century various interlocking high carbon systems were established. This sedimented high carbon social practices, engendering huge population growth, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and the potentially declining availability of oil that made this world go round. Especially important in stabilising this pattern was the ‘carbon military-industrial complex’ around the world. The book goes on to examine how in this new century it is systems that have to change, to move from growing high carbon systems to those that are low carbon. Many suggestions are made as to how to innovate such low carbon systems. It is shown that such a transition has to happen fast so as to create positive feedbacks of each low carbon system upon each other. Various scenarios are elaborated of differing futures for the middle of this century, futures that all contain significant costs for the scale, extent and richness of social life. Climate Change and Society thus attempts to replace economics with sociology as the dominant discipline in climate change analysis. Sociology has spent much time examining the nature of modern societies, of modernity, but mostly failed to analyse the carbon resource base of such societies. This book seeks to remedy that failing. It should appeal to teachers and students in sociology, economics, environmental studies, geography, planning, politics and science studies, as well as to the public concerned with the long term future of carbon and society.