Ah, the summer reading list. For generations of school children it’s been the bane of an otherwise carefree summer. Maybe you remember those feelings of loathing and resentment, looking at a long list of stodgy classics. If this is case, you’ll be glad to know that the reading list as we knew it may be going out of fashion.

According to the Boston Globe, many schools are now opting to create summer reading lists that use the carrot rather than the stick. Teachers and administrators are looking to entice children with titles that are more popular and current. So don’t be surprised if your kid brings home a summer reading assignment that includes Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith, or Our Dumb World by the Onion. And get this: more lists are becoming optional.

Proponents of more lenient and appealing summer assignments argue that their aim is to foster a love of reading, rather than considering books a burden. After all, it’s hard not to resent a homework assignment when the sun outside is so inviting.

Boston Globe: Sands Shift in Summer Reading

(Photo by Emily Mills via Flickr/Creative Commons)

The recent uprisings in Iran may prove that social media sites have changed the way we communicate for good. But while many laud Facebook and Twitter for giving a voice to citizen journalists around the world, one expert has voiced her reservations.

Danah Boyd, social media researcher for Microsoft and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, challenged the notion that social media sites are a "great equalizer." At this past weekend's Personal Democracy Forum in New York, Boyd cited her own research in arguing that demographics of site users often follow racial and socio-economic lines.

Boyd gave the example of the "white flight" from MySpace in recent years — comparing the high percentage of whites abandoning their MySpace accounts to the white migration from urban areas in the latter part of the 20th century. According to Boyd, the media is in part to blame for the attitude among white and educated people that MySpace is "cheesy" and filled with riff-raff and pedophiles.

Boyd stressed that this so called cyber-segregation should be a matter of urgent concern to all of us. "When people are structurally divided, they do not share space with one another, they do not communicate with one another; this can and does breed intolerance."

New York Observer: In the Battle Between Facebook and MySpace, A Digital 'White Flight'

Next week on Word of Mouth, self-knowledge through numbers. High-tech monitors allow us to record our running speed, caffeine and alcohol intake, heart rate, diet, and sleep patterns. We now use our smartphones to signal our location and tweet what we eat, participate in drug trials and medical studies, and keep track of our finances or menstrual cycles online, and compare that data with others.

Self-tracking is the new obsession, but is this cutting-edge science or good old-fashioned narcissism? You tell us: do you keep track of and record any of your own activities online? What can we learn from all the data we gather, or from the fact that we gather so much of it? Call our listener line at (603) 223-2448, or leave a comment below.

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San Jose State University's annual writing competition recently concluded with a bizarre twist: its winners were recognized for their extraordinarily poor writing.

Named after an author who began his 1830 novel with the famously trite line “It was a dark and stormy night,” the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest judges writers on how feebly they write the opening line of an imaginary novel. The overall winner clunkily described a screaming contest on a whaler off of Nantucket, but our favorite entry was in the detective genre. The winning sentence in this category came from Eric Rice of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin:

"She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida the pink ones, not the white ones except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn't wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren't."

The Boston Globe: Screamin' Seafaring Tale Wins Bad Writing Contest

(Photo courtesy h3 six)