Reading with awareness

Today we don't meet just a lot of advertisements but we meet texts of different kinds that tempt us to take part of some thought that someone has written either profoundly or maybe just scribbled. At the moment I see myself as a surfer between texts of different genres: from profound texts to scribbled texts and the reading happens from dawn till dusk. There is the morning newspaper, the newspaper on the bus, the five books I read at the same time, the e-mails, the blogs, the documents of strategy, the texts I try to produce myself, the discussions of students within a course...But do I really read with awareness so I could tell another person about what I have read? How profound is my reading and do I really have time for that? As I work with information literacy skills "cognitive overload" is often mentioned ad nauseam. But I even think that that's a really important point when information literacy skills are learned. We don't just need the skills to find the information and evaluate it we should also try to process the information so much that it evokes new innovative ideas. It goes of course without saying but I feel that it's rare that you are both a really fast and a profound reader and that you're able to read a lot of texts and process them thoroughly. Do we really have time today to read a text, then think about it, and then read it again and then write about the thought? And if you read a lot and surf around, is there a possibility that you get lost in the texts and the border between your thoughts and other people's thoughts get blurred...These thoughts come up as I have to discuss plagiarism with students within a course...Soon....Anyway couldn't you say that academic texts differ from other texts also in the sense that there is more thinking behind, which means that you can't be that up-to-date with all the superficial societal changes...Just a thought