[DiapDealer]

The problem with bemoaning the "damage" that social media and "skim"-reading can have on how we perceive/approach literature is that it ignores the fact that most Readers (capital R) have always had several different reading "modes" at their disposal. Even before the internet we were capable of switching between news/article-, study-, entertainment-, and "deeply refective-" modes of reading. I don't think putting the text on a screen and giving The Reader the ability access it just about anywhere they go has much bearing on their ability to "switch gears," myself. And of the readers who never develop anything other than Tweet-mode, article-browsing reading skills ... well, lets just say I don't believe they'd have been likely to develop "deeper" reading skills even if Facebook, Twitter, BuzzFeed and the like (or the internet in general) had never come to be. After all ... we had people whose only experiences with reading came from skimming short newspaper/magazine-sized snippets long before the internet was invented.

I was asked how I could stand "just sitting there reading books" long before I had my first email account. The skim-reading, what's-the-gist-ma'am, article-browser wasn't born with the internet and social media.

Readers read--in a multitude of gears. Those who ONLY read in tweet-sized chunks, were probably never going to become Readers to begin with.

Social Media isn't killing the Literature Star.