I find it tremendously sad that low quality reading material not only exist but actually be favored over other higher quality works expressing the same ideas and themes. Twilight over Dracula, The Hunger Games over The Running Man... etc.
This is not to say that all new material is low quality. Even to this day I still fall in love with new series; The Kingkiller Chronicles for instance (Pat, it by some miracle you're reading this please hurry you sadistic, evil, wonderful author). What I am trying to get at is that there seems to be lower standards for today's youth when it comes to reading material. I myself have only just turned 18 years old and have witnessed first hand the sort of depreciation the education system has forced upon curriculum and at least here in Canada the two largest hit subjects have to be Social-Studies and Language-Arts closely followed by Mathematics. As far as mathematics goes the curriculum went from teaching probability theory including Bayes' theorem to teaching only manipulation of graphs in the past eight years. English however is a completely different story as most of the fault in that subject at least can be laid squarely at the feet of one of the most significant (and in my opinion most wonderful) technological developments in human history; the internet. In my experience as a student the internet hinders the consumption of more traditional media such as books due to access to so much information being so readily available. This is not the problem, what I find problematical is that most schools have failed to keep up with the education curve and focus more on vocabulary building and other useless exercises of that ilk instead of simply letting those sort of things come from the novels and other literary forms that should be taught in place of the endless rote learning that seems to have unfortunately become the norm.
Please note that I am not advocating any sort of sky-is-falling doomsday scenario whence people stop reading books; that's simply not going to happen. What I'm more concerned about is the lack of discrimination in reading material. It's not that there's anything I inherently bad about Twilight or The Hunger Games or Divergent or whatever the flavor of the month happens to be. It's just that they are retelling of stories they have been told before and at least in my opinion have been told better: As my motto on this sort of thing goes "Life it too short to be reading shit". Certainly there are a wide variety of stories out there and for a whole generation to suddenly latch onto a single series for a majority of its memetic material is troubling to me, perhaps because it lacks variety and perhaps because it stifles individual thinking; a commodity which has become rare in the past few generations as the common thread of consumerism turns quests for individuality into just another saleable item. That however is a topic for another day.
