Article critiques and young adults

           One of the articles I read dealt with the use of technology with young adults, especially video chat.  They like to see their friends, not just text with them.  Sometimes they just have them on their device while they complete homework together, maybe not talking the entire time, but there nonetheless. 

This article makes a lot of sense to me.  Growing up without texting or my own telephone for that matter, has always left me with the question of how can the texting be enough to communicate with each other.  This article addresses that concern by looking at video chatting as a more face to face connection with one another.  It is hard to read body language in a text.  One can read a text one way and the author meant it a complete different way.  This is where more face to face interaction is necessary.  There is also an immediate response with video chat where you might have to wait to a response from a text.  I would be more concerned of what I looked like on video chat, but teens seem to just want the face to face interaction.  I have witnessed something similar to this with my own children.  They enjoy online gaming with their friends.  They don’t actually see their friends, but they correspond with them while they are playing the game together.  It is like having the friend at our house, but he is at his own home.  Their conversation is in real time and they see each other, but as a character not their own self.  Video chatting, although not taking the place of face to face contact, does definitely offer teens a feeling of belonging with their friends.

The other article I read discusses a brand of storytelling sometimes forgotten in which teens may be interested in reading.  They are bande dessinee (Franco-Belgian), comics (English), and manga (Japanese).  Basically they are strip stories or drawn strips, or our more common term of comics.  Although they each developed on their own in their own areas, more is becoming known and sought after them.  The increase of in graphic novels in the United States is one reason credited to the popularity of these genres.                                                                                                                           

I was drawn to this article because of its fairly new introduction.  More and more readers are discovering the genre and becoming fans.  I recently saw a section in the local bookstore.  As the article mentions, five million readers is a big fan base.  Another think which interests me in the manga stories is the similarity to popular boys’ cartoons of the day.  Most teachers have heard of Pokemon and even recently Beyblades.  Both popular toys and characters have some Japanese background.  Having boys and being too familiar with Pokemon and Beyblades, I recently mistook a manga book for one of the cartoons my boys watch.  The artistic style is similar.  As for teens, anything to draw an interest in reading is positive.  Some kids just don’t fit into your so called normal reading literature and this may be another avenue to get them hooked on reading.