The "Vision of the Afternoon" show on Vision Plus decided to play a game for Philology students by combining authors with various works of art. So we're saying "The Last City" (Petro Marko) with Ismail Kadare. Because the answers were "awful", so the students didn't catch the mistake, Anila Mullahi (lecturer in Literature), Aida Baro (translator), Anisa Ymeri (journalist) and Irena Toçi (publisher) were invited to the show. Discussion: "Young people do not read".
Rather than the topic of discussion, worrying is the way to reach this conclusion. The show's video proves nothing, for many reasons.
First, brief street interviews are not enough to reach conclusions of this nature. A more genuine poll is needed, which is worth considering if it reaches 1,000 per million inhabitants. Interviewed students are counted with their fingers.
Second, how confident are we that the vast majority responded incorrectly? At this point, it is clear that the show aired interviews of those who said that "Lahuta e Malcis" was written by Kadare and "Chronicle in stone" by Gjergj Fishta.
Third, the interview was conducted in the courtyard of the Faculty of History and Philology, as if to ironic that even students of Albanian language and literature do not read. In fact, Philology, in addition to the Department of Linguistics and Literature, also includes the Department of Journalism and Communication, Archeology and Cultural Heritage, the Department of Geography and History. Even in the same building, foreign language students also teach.
"An unrelated interview, there you may have caught anyone to ask," someone writes on YouTube. Likewise, Anila Mullahi noted that almost all students of Student City pass in that building.
Simply put, you cannot claim that the Philology students do not read by interviewing random people who pass by the courtyard of the building, where there is apparently no further evidence studying there.
Another important issue relates to facing the camera. Not everyone responds alike and is capable of controlling emotions. ?Have you read Kadare's latest book 'Chronicle in Stone'?? One journalist asks a journalist. ?Yes, I read it. It's been a while since I've read it, ?she says, and it's not the end of the world not to know that The Chronicle in Stone is not the last book of the writer. Maybe I know, but it didn't pay much attention to the definitive "last book."
To conclude, it is inappropriate to claim in 2019 that young people do not read. Today, most people are in constant contact with a wide variety of information.
They may not read Petro Marko and George Fishta, but that doesn't mean they don't read other authors. Even if they do not read that not everyone is fond of the book and there is nothing wrong with it, they are informed through films and documentaries. Likewise, not everyone reads fiction books; we are saying some are business savvy.
And if we want to argue, let's talk about the scandalous situation of the National Library and the Library of Philology. Let us raise our voices for those who read that casual interviews on the street make it very easy to become a moralist.
