There seems to be a lot of talk about reading and literacy. And no, it doesn't concern schools. It's the Internet. Some argue that the web is bad for reading, dumbing us down, destroying our attention spans, distracting us from classic texts. On the other hand, people point to the good things about digital reading, positing text-message novels and "participatory media as new forms of storytelling with lower barriers to entry." But folks, we're looking in wrong direction for this debate on 'the death of reading'.

For one thing, we quite possibly have more access to information than ever before but it doesn't mean we understand or utilize it to the best of abilities. We've got books, newspapers, magazines, news reports, radio shows, cable channels, and now, the Internet. All these mediums and we question literacy problems? We need to explain that term better because 2009 literacy isn't about finishing 300-page book or slogging through 20 pages of an article. It's about taking what we read and applying it in our lives, it's about finding the good stuff on the Net, it's about looking at all our resources and deciding which one is bull crap and which one is not. At the risk of sounding like a sentimental dope, we can't just be readers. We've got to be critical readers.

I remember visiting relatives in Canada and one of my second cousins, about 10 years old, was pulling up a map for directions to a reception hall. Present adults, my parents included, were suitably impressed. I suffered a brief moment of envy that this girl would grow up in an almost pure digital generation. But I've got to say. Even for kids and teens who grow up with gadgets, knowing how to pull up Google maps or uploading a video doesn't translate to information literacy. Anyone can use a search engine, but can they use it well?

Search engines seem like a gift from the gods but even that must be learned. You've got to know how to filter. [FILTER] is the big key here. Using search engines like Google, Yahoo!, or Bing can be great for research or they can be devious and direct us to those sites most clever at playing the search engine optimization game.

For example, I'm going to open a new window and do a Google search for "mineral water." If you're expecting a group of well-rounded sources (cited, reviewed, etc.), you'll have to think again. You'll get Wikipedia at #1; then a clean, simple home page of a mineral water store based in Colorado at #2; and the crème de la crème, a flash-based home page for Evian water (french language optional) at #3. I'd hazard a guess and say that these wouldn't be the sites that teachers and professors alike would recommend for important papers. You'd have to get through more than 3 pages, trudging through Sephora makeup ads and Merriam-Webster definitions, before finding the appropriate information.

What this example shows is that we're not facing a death of literacy. It's a death of information literacy. Most of what we get on surface searches are pushed forward by private companies. META elements. Used more frequently in the 90's, meta tags enabled anyone to provide a set of words—book dog fido—by meta tags in an HTML code on their webpage. When using a search engine and typing any of those words, your page that has this meta code has a better chance at higher ranking. And higher ranking means higher traffic to the website. Of course, many people caught on, lots of unscrupulous people would spamdex, and as a consequence, search engines became more sophisticated. Search engine robots can weed out keyword spamming with other factors—relevance, technical precision of source code, broken hyperlinks, page views, redundancy, just to name a few—so we don't face too large of a problem.