Seventh dispostitional blog: Whats a book?

I was browsing facebook today.  And I saw a notification from someone who I haven't talked to since high school.  I didn't realize he had a facebook page, so I clicked on his page to see what he's been up to in the two years of my graduation.

I came across his information - the place where he lists his favorite activities, interests, music, etc.  Activities:  partying.  fair enough; I already knew that.  Music:  AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, etc.  okay; I can see him read that genre of music.  Favorite books: nothing.

In fact, when asked about his favorite books, his response was:

'Whats a book?'

What's a book?  Is this a joke?  Everyone knows what a book is; and everyone has their favorite book.  It wasn't that he honestly did not know what a book was, it was that it has become cool to not have a favorite book.  In fact, being smart has become uncool.

What the?  When did this happen?  When did being educated become something that was frowned upon?  Sadly, its happening.  Girls pretend to be 'ditsy' or 'blond' for popularity.  Libraries need new campaigns to draw in today's youth into their doors.  People who are well known are put on posters where they seem to be reading.  All for the hope of making reading and education seem 'cool'. 

I've been thinking a lot about the blessings America has.  Its hard to imagine living anywhere else and have to struggle for things that we Americans take for granted.  For example,  I read somewhere that families in America spend more on trash bags than half of the world's nations spend on all goods.  More trash bags than food, water, clothing, shelter.  Combined.  We spend more on things whose soul use is to be thrown away than half of all nations spend on necessities.

We take education for granted here, too.  Recently, I came across an interesting video on TED.  This man, Sugata Mitra, did an experiment in which he put a computer in the slums of India where the children can use it whenever they wanted to.  Many of them, living in the slums, had no idea what a computer or internet was.  But as Mitra observed them, the children became more and more knowledgeable and curious and eager to learn.

One example he shares is particularly impressive to me.  He gives a couple of Indian girls a computer with sound recognition technology and the task of being able to talk in such a way that the computer knew what they were saying.  They tried it for the first time.  Obviously, them speaking their native language and the computer set to recognize English, it didn't work.  But over the next few weeks and months, the Indian girls worked on it; finally they were able to not only speak in such a way for the computer to know what they were saying, but learned how to speak English in the process.

English.  They learned a new language.  Because of computer and the desire to accomplish the task.

I doubt that, if you did the same sort of experiment in any inner city of America, you would get the same result.  It's because we take our education for granted.  We don't try.  We don't care. 

What's a book?
how about, Whats wrong with reading?