November 29, 2012
12:00 noon – 2:00 p.m. | Ponderosa Annex F, Room 203, 2044 Lower Mall
Professor Mikko Lehtonen, Media Culture, University of Tempere, Finland
The lecture is based on a recently concluded research project, “New reading communities, new ways of reading,” that gathered fresh knowledge on how young people in Finland actually read today. The lecture looks at the dominant, residual and emergent values of reading in late modern societies and cultures. These values are then compared to how and what the “Google generation” actually reads. The project results show that there are some significant ruptures in ways of reading, but that there are also some perhaps surprising continuities as well. The dominant idea that print media is used for “serious” reading and other forms of media are used mainly for entertainment seems quite problematic in the light of the results.