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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jmucchiello" data-source="post: 5634876" data-attributes="member: 813">The change has little to do with reading habits and a lot to do with general education. ENWorld might not be the right place to debate this but "long ago" education involved learning the classics. And everyone who was considered "educated" had read these same books. So making reference to Greek mythology or Virgil or Shakespear was going to get your point across. Today, kids don't read more than a handful of those classics and have no encouragement to seek them out on their own.OTOH, the same problem could be caused by modern "culture". I prefer to blame education but admit that the lure of TV/Xbox/Internet is a large part of kids not reading.As someone else pointed out, space/weight is key factor here. If you want to read a "current" novel, it is hardcover and weighs over a pound. Carry more than one and you need to lug around a large bag. A kindle or nook weighs less than 1/2 a pound and fits in a medium purse or a large coat pocket.I'd like to know why you thought the fact that it was technological mattered. Whether they know it or not, form is as important as function. People like iPhones because Apple spent a lot of time choosing its form. Technology is not the cause of fragmented society. Information is. Technology is merely the transport layer for that information. I was commenting on this recently. The world was small for a while and then exploded in size. (This takes a bit to setup.)Long, long ago, the world was tiny. It was the small valley your village sat in. Sure there were "far away" places. But for 99.99% of the population, they were born and died with a couple square miles of land and lived among a group of people who lived and died in that same area. The world was small.The world grew as the Industrial revolution came along and people became more mobile and as far back as the start of the 20th century, going to the far reaches of the world was feasible for a determined person. You could cross 2-3 continents by railroad with ease. The world was big.Then TV came along and the world shrank again. Yes, you could still travel far and wide but the common culture of the day had shrunk. Everyone watched Clark Gable movies and the number of well-known people were well-known to all far and wide. Everyone watch the Ed Sullivan show. Everyone knew where they were when Kennedy died or when Armstrong and Alden landed on the moon.And now in the Information Age, there is no commonality of popularity. There are thousands of different entertainment options vying for your eyeballs and no two people watch even 1% of the same TV programming/surf the same websites week to week. There is a huge fracture in what "everyone" knows. The shared experience is unusual. The world is huge and everyone is an island within it.Or perhaps, the world is very small again. Maybe island is the wrong metaphor. Should I say valley as I did at the start of this and call the world, my world, your world, small?</blockquote>

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