IN today’s technology-driven world, developing a reading and writing culture among primary school students, teenagers and even young adults can be challenging.
With all types of material easily accessible on Google, studies have shown that it’s sometimes difficult to cultivate an appreciation for physical books and writing among a younger demographic.
President of the Tobago Writers Guild Jewel Greene-George acknowledges this reality but sees the merit in marrying digitisation with promoting an enabling environment through which young people can explore their creativity.
“The orange economy (business model rooted in creativity) speaks to an economic model where goods and services have intellectual value because they are the product of ideas and the expertise of their creators. Covid19 has not been all negative because the Caribbean had been, pre-pandemic, ever so slowly creeping towards a digitised environment,” she told Sunday Newsday.
“The pandemic forced us out of our comfort zones and into the realisation of a fully digitised mode of communication and doing business. We had to become very agile, very quickly, which the guild did extremely well. It also been moving towards a digitised environment by way of banking, membership, meetings, communications, workshops and book products.”
Greene-George believes the Ministry of Digital Transformation’s $200 million allocation is not only meant to drastically increase Trinidad and Tobago’s national digital literacy rate but also to remodel how citizens conceptualise business processes and ICT, which falls within the ambit of the orange economy.
“So this social media age has in so many ways moved the orange economy and its players forward at quantum speed and we hope that part of that budgetary allocation will be dedicated towards the literary arts culture and the publication sector as well.”
Still, she learnt that Tobago’s reading and writing culture leaves much to be desired.
“I’ve fielded enquiries about Tobago’s reading and writing culture, with people citing the closure of bookstores on the island and that outside of educational reading material, book sales are abysmal.”
Greene-George said although the development of a leisure reading habit is an objective of the primary school curriculum, there is a dearth of empirical evidence on the extent to which this is being attained.
“The general consensus is that Tobago isn’t reading and more specifically, that men aren’t reading. But with only 24-hours in a day and a multitude of other media competing for our attention, including cable/satellite TV, radio, the internet and e-mail, the competition is stiff for people to make time to read books.
“So while I would agree that we have a declining reading culture, I also have to qualify that by distinguishing where the decline lies – the reading of physical books and reading for leisure or pleasure.”
Greene-George is the marketing director of Caribbean Social Media Hub TT, a digital comp
