darkenedrebel:
And now, with the advent of the internet and its glittering concomitants, which has made information easily accessible to all and at laser-quick speed, one would expect an 'oil boom' in the reading department, or a generation of readers if you will.

Unfortunately, a downward trajectory in academics is the phenomenon de jour. Youthful hands that are meant to fan the embers of scholarship have been diverted and put to use in areas that border on the mundane, inconsequential and unproductive: ranging from petty Twitter squabbles to mindless Facebooking and celebrity gossips, to mention but a few.

If you tell a teenage boy that "the pen is mightier than the sword'', his rejoinder would most likely be: "Yes, I agree, but the blitz of Instagram is mightier than the pen".

The activities of our lovely ladies must also be brought to the front burner—the ones among them that regard books as an anathema, but idolize the 'selfie stick' the same way Mozart reverred the Harpsichord. Word on the street is that a certain Naija babe is prohibitive favourite to clinch the Nobel Peace Prize for 'most selfies taken in a month'. Okay, that was a joke.

Before you begin with the verbal missiles, I should make it clear that 'selfie-taking and co' are not bad per se, and that goes without saying that I too have had a fair share of social media razzmatazz. They only become a cause for worry when they are slide-stepping for the front row with the things that actually matter, or worse, take precedence over them.

As we all know, reading and writing are mutually exclusive: the less you do of the former, the more the latter suffers. Little wonder why poor writing skills stems from people failing to avail themselves of the serendipities that books are known to furnish one with.

A major bête noire for me has always been the grammatical and spelling errors that are rife on social media platforms—a huge chunk of the culprits being youths and young adults—. In a bid to 'feel among' and follow fad, in a bid to short-circuit conversations, people resort to using slangs or writing in short-hand when passing their message across—all of which inflicts a heavy toll on their writing skills in the long run.

I used to joke with my buddies that a time would come when formal and application letters would look like this: "Hey yo, I reli nid dis job, sir. Pls, I wuld appreciate if u gave favourable consideration 2 my letter. Tnx, urs faithfully". Funny, right?

The reading-solely-to-pass-exams syndrome is also another corollary of Bibliophobia. To worsen matters, most of what is 'crammed' is ultimately forgotten on completion of exams since information is never transferred from short-term to long-term memory. The rationale behind this practice is not far-fetched: many people consider reading to be a Donkey work (students being the most culpable)

A seismic psychological shift away from this wrongheaded mindset would not only help in engendering a habit of reading, but also aid in removing the blinkers off people's eyes until they begin to view books as therapeutic and fail-proof mediums in sating intellectual curiosity.

Some people also take to selective reading. And their reason is usually predicated on the grounds that certain books have no utility in praxis. While I can slightly identify with their viewpoint and think a signal-to-noise ratio would help in preventing information overload, or what we call 'infobesity', I am still of the belief that no knowledge is wasted.

Another old chestnut you hear ad nauseam is that too much reading overworks the brain. A joke of the century I must say, considering the fact that the human brain is made up of over 14 billion cells and connections, which when optimally utilized is capable of storing all of the information in the world.

I would part on this note: while money like oxygen is necessary for survival, it is not the purpose of living; for the renown that wealth confers on an individual is fleeting and frail; mental excellence on the other hand is a lasting possession; seek it, acquire it, and even the sky would not be your limit, but rather a springboard to greater and more giddier heights.