Neil Thompson’s Lesson for Living – Read and write

There has been some scaremongering going on that involves suggesting that reading and writing are dying out, in their present form at least. I’m not so sure that I would go that far, but things are certainly changing. Let’s start with reading. The traditional idea was that much learning was done by reading and subsequently applying the knowledge gained to situations you encounter. The more reading you did, the better equipped you were to deal, in an intelligent, informed way, with the challenges life threw up for you, whether at work or in your private life. However, a very clear pattern that I have noticed is that many people now are not reading to anywhere near the extent they used to. A common way of learning now goes something like this: I want to learn how to do x, so I put into Google: ‘How to do x’. What then comes up will be either a short set of written instructions or, increasingly a ‘how to’ video. While this can be a really useful and effective way of learning very practical things, it has a lot of limitations …

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