Food For Thought

Today I came across a newspaper article. It describes the launch of "Mari Membaca 1Malaysia" programme (Lets read 1 Malaysia) at our National Library.

I felt happy for Malaysia to create various initiatives to make Malaysians read although the effectiveness of these campaigns are still questionable. However, it all come to an end when our Information, Communication and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Rais Yatim said:

"It is good that people are going online to read but we must balance it out with book reading habits because we don't want our younger generation to be slaves to the computer monitor. Every three hours of computer usage should be balanced out with an hour of reading books."

Furthermore, he commented that his ministry was stepping up efforts to balance computer literacy and book reading habits as "the personal computer has become a competitor in the conventional knowledge seeking process".

I thought the US/Europe called this "digitization of information" as a result of modernization. And what the heck about balancing computer usage with reading for? I wouldn't mind if he says sports!

The original article can be found here.