So here's how I spent a good portion of my Sunday (aside from ruminating on "The Dark Knight" after a second viewing) - catching up on reading a growing stack of GQ, Wired and Fast Company, along with a helping of the Sunday New York Times.

Probably not untypical for someone in the word game - but is it typical that I read the magazines and newspapers and not their websites?

An article in the Sunday Times asks the question is reading online the same as reading the old-fashioned way?

Though the story suffers from some of the usual "are the children - and by association our future! - doomed" scenarios that seem to crop up in a lot of stories about "the young people" (standardized test scores are down, literacy rates are dropping, time on the Internets is increasing), the story still does raise an interesting question about what it means to read, and what exactly is the experience of reading.

Is reading sitting down somewhere in a comfortable position and feeling the edges of each page as you turn?

Or is reading sitting in front of a computer and laptop and scrolling, clicking and jumping around on a page?

Or - third option - is it just good to read no matter what the medium?

The Times makes a good show of talking to experts, parents and kids, and a more complete picture emerges.
- Academics fear students are losing their grip on literacy by spending too much time online, trusting unreliable sources and engaging in 2 mux l33t speak.
- Parents worry their kids aren't reading enough for school, but find that their kids seem to be doing just fine.
- Kids say in the time it takes to read a book they can read several sites, check ongoing discussions and get information faster.

The story raises another question that has popped up elsewhere recently - like in The Atlantic's "Is Google Making Us Stupid? - does reading online shorten attention spans and generally change the way we consume and process information?

Not surprisingly this question also effects...thats right, you guessed it: Newspapers.

It's not just whether young people read the newspaper, but how people read their news and what they expect from it. Weighing in at four pages online and a almost two full inside pages, The Times story itself is a good example of a debate most newsrooms have - will people read longer stories online? (The answer is a resounding...uh, maybe?)

Maybe the better way to look at this is that once again technology # namely the Internets # has co-opted and evolved something that seemed unchangeable. Now we're looking at something completely new and different - and that means reading isn't what it was anymore.

That means that you may not do as good a job reading and analyzing "Jane Eyre" and "The Sun Also Rises" as your parents did - but I'd bet you're able to glean as much information about it online (using substantiated sources hopefully.)

That also means that reading is not always linear - just like you can skip around in a video you can hop in and out of text, graphics, animation and yes, videos.

An insightful note from article: Schools around the world are exploring how to test students for internet literacy. The U.S. is not.

There will always be a place for "traditional" reading in some form - gotta pay bills and order off menus, right? - but we're moving on to a place where "reading" is a multi-layered (multi-platform?) process, and can be just as exciting.

Lastly - I wanted to throw in one of my favorite quotes about reading. I'll leave it to you guys to suss out the source. There may or may not be a guest post up for grabs for correct guesses.

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