Listening is not Reading
According to an article in the NY Times, there is an increasing number of people who seem to feel the listening to a book on tape or audio book is the equivalent of reading the book.
As someone who majored in English Literature in college and who has spent a good portion of her life enjoying the written word, I truly beg to differ.
I've heard a book or two on tape, but that was mostly writings by David Sedaris or Jon Stewart. It would seem the musings of comedians do make for good listening.
However, I have also tried what you might dub real books as well, although they were sufficiently distracting, they were absolutely no substitute for reading the "traditional" way.
Now I'm not going to make an uber-judgement and say that those who read books with their eyes are superior to those who listen to books with their ears. Sure it's great that people are still accessing literature, no matter how they do it. True, I would never think of slogging through an of the paragons of the literary world by downloading it to my Mp3 player, but those who do are more than welcome to.
However under no circumstances will I call listening to an audio book reading. That's just crazy talk.
posted by Smapdi at 2:51 PM
2 Comments:
i wonder what that would have sounded if you had read it to me. can you start posting mp3s of your blog? ;)
Lemme guess. You are just some old fashioned republican type with a prejudice against listening books because it is "untraditional" or perhaps "unnatural".
My own culture seems to value listening to its sacred texts read aloud in public as a perfectly reasonale way to access them.
It seems very Catholic to inflate the value of the written work (and then keep masses illerate).
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