Scholarly Article #3 - "Gains and Losses: New Forms of Text, Knowledge, and Learning" by Gunther Kress

It's very interesting how this article compared the written word and the viewed image, or rather, the book and the webpage. It seems to me that books are more controlled by authors, who assume that readers will follow a certain order (i.e., on the page, in a chapter, in the book) whereas the creators of a webpage cannot control who visits a website and what the visitors will make of it. Webpages can be accessed through many points of entry in comparison to the one found on a written page. While the internet and multimedia are amazing, I see why some people are concerned about the diminishing of the written word. Our culture has become so fast-paced in the world of social media that many do not ever slow down to read a book. This decline can be seen in the lack of writing skills of the younger generations. We rely on images to communicate, and so we do not learn to actually write. As an editor, I see this in the papers that I review, and it can be pretty depressing. I wish there was a way to make reading a social event—something to be discussed with friends—to rival social media, but with the way we're going, I have little hope that will ever happen.