Dear Portland Public LIbrary

[maineac]

Dear Portland Public Library,

Let me be the first to applaud your teen librarian’s awesome idea to use video games to lure teenagers to the library. Because I’m sure you’re going to get a lot of criticism from old farts who say books books blah blah blah. (And BTW, how awesome is it to have a special “teen librarian!” Because teens? They are THAT

Comments

[maineac]

It's not really a slippery slope argument. I just think it's the worst form of self-delusion to pretend that bringing teens into a library to play video games means they will trip over a book and suddenly start reading. Or that playing video games is a form of literacy. (The preponderance of evidence shows exactly the opposite: there's a strong correlation between video activities and a lowered "creative IQ" in young kids.) Gaming is more of an activity that a teen center should be sponsoring, and a teen librarian (I really loathe that term)might want to think of ways to connect kids to books, because they do, after all, read books. I think the idea of "luring" them with games kind of insults their intelligence.

But I would be glad to be proved wrong. What is your friend's experience?