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How Do Things Stick To Us in a Culture Where Information and Ideas Are Up So Quickly That We Have No Time To Assess One Before Another Takes Its Place?
David L. Ulin, a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the California Book Award, shares an excerpt from his book "The Lost Art of Reading", to The Paris Review: This is the conundrum, the gorilla in the midst of any conversation about literature in contemporary culture, the question of dilution and refraction, of whether and how books matter, of the impact they can have. We talk about the need to read, about reading at risk, about reluctant readers, but we seem unwilling to confront the fallout of one simple observation: literature doesn't, can't, have the influence it once did. For Kurt Vonnegut, the writer who made me want to be a writer, the culprit was television. "When I started out," he recalled in 1997, "it was possible to make a living as a freelance writer of fiction, and live out of your mailbox, because it was still the golden age of magazines, and it looked as though that could go on forever ... Then television, with no malice whatsoever -- just a better buy for advertisers -- knocked the magazines out of business."
For new media reactionaries such as Lee Siegel and Andrew Keen, the problem is technology, the endless distractions of the internet, the breakdown of authority in an age of blogs and Twitter, the collapse of narrative in a hyperlinked, multi-networked world. What this argument overlooks, of course, is that literary culture as we know it was the product of a technological revolution, one that began with Johannes Gutenberg's invention of movable type. We take books and mass literacy for granted, but in reality, they are a recent iteration, going back not even a millennium. Less than four hundred years ago -- barely a century and a half after Gutenberg -- John Milton could still pride himself without exaggeration on having read every book then available, the entire history of written thought accessible to a single mind.
For new media reactionaries such as Lee Siegel and Andrew Keen, the problem is technology, the endless distractions of the internet, the breakdown of authority in an age of blogs and Twitter, the collapse of narrative in a hyperlinked, multi-networked world. What this argument overlooks, of course, is that literary culture as we know it was the product of a technological revolution, one that began with Johannes Gutenberg's invention of movable type. We take books and mass literacy for granted, but in reality, they are a recent iteration, going back not even a millennium. Less than four hundred years ago -- barely a century and a half after Gutenberg -- John Milton could still pride himself without exaggeration on having read every book then available, the entire history of written thought accessible to a single mind.
What Are You Asking And Why Capitalize Every Word
Short titles.
Concise expressions of ideas.
Not using 30 words when maybe 6 will do.
That's how you avoid Information Overload and Volatility.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Things move more quickly now and people read a bit less books due to more competing media. What's the big deal?
they gotta be 'perceived' as
We can see how American society has become dumbed down coarsened over the last generation or two.
There are many things this can be attributed to, but one of the primary ones is that fewer people are reading, or have even passable reading comprehension skills.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
the entire history of written thought accessible to a single mind.
As if that's a good thing.
_
love is just extroverted narcissism
Huh? They don't. Unless it's being sold to us, then it's easily for sale behind a wall of friendly IP. (Not v4 or v6, v$.) Better hope it doesn't wear out (analog) or the company goes out of business (digital.)
"Grimms' Fairy Tales" is a reworked TV show. When's the last time you saw a movie from Edgar Allen Poe? It's out there, but well known. And besides, where are the jump scares, blood, special effects, and action? No zombies? Who IS this loser, anyway?
I live on a farm. I've got cows. (OK, I rent and THEY'VE got cows.) My mom milked along with her parents; I've still got the butter churn. I can recognize a cow on good days, she's usually on the milk-carton with a daisy around her head. (The Logo.) I remember her telling me things and I've got decommissioned physical objects (a great-cousin's spinning wheel along with a picture of her and it) but I haven't the foggiest. And what stories I remember I can't pass on to anyone else, since I never had kids. So a little of my family history will go to my cousin, and that's it. (Only child of only child. The family tree is sparse out my way.)
Our culture, the public domain, is being obtained, packaged, and resold to us, with the original forgotten or becoming a copyright infringement. Thanks to Sonny (and Cher), Walt, and many other helpers.
We're all too busy looking at moving, shiny objects and text, and worried about losing out (getting behind) to worry about the old, small things. And the old, small, boring people too, for that matter.
Stay off my lawn, or I'll rise as a zombie and chase you off it. Kids.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Did someone sneak in a special update to the slashcode to allow this in? We can't use such long titles for our comments or JEs, and until now I don't recall ever seeing such a long title. It's even longer than what my web browser wants to allow ...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Summary: My son doesn't like "The Great Gatsby."
Perhaps he should ask his son what *HE* likes to read. Most people do not like to be forced to read something.
As Nathaniel Hawthorne said, "I'm ruining ninth grade for everyone."
This is something you are doing, not something being done to you. It is impossible for them to sell it to you, unless you decide to buy.
Not just picking on you; the entire thread is about this: the phenomenon in question is 100% voluntary. Everyone here is still able to go read a book if they want to.
Express your ideas with the mediums you have, not the mediums you want.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
This is the conundrum, the gorilla in the midst of any conversation about literature in contemporary culture,
Who the fuck says that? Did you hear about the movie "Gorillas in the Mist" and confuse it with another idiom that people actually use, like elephant in the room?
This headline you chose is a perfect example of what will be lost quickly in the flood of information we're facing. What people want and can remember is a short slogan, a punchline. Not something long winded and convoluted, possibly with subclauses or, even worse than that, main clauses and subclauses that interject each other, or get interrupted by long, convoluted lists of adjectives that add no information, with inelegant gerund constructs interjecting and interrupting that, if they are grammatically correct used in the first place, only add fluff but no substance.
In other words: Want to be remembered, be terse!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Poetry makes nothing happen."
- W. H. Auden
is fail.
In Tech culture dozens of things change every day any you only find out the stuff that affects you personally plus a bit of general buzz. Do you guys even know what industry you are covering?
Television was a phenomenon long prior to 1997 when, according to the clueless author, books and magazines were still in power.
Magazines were not affected by television. The entire print industry was devastated by the Internet.
Fewer and fewer people read paper books, magazines, newspapers and news letters because of the internet. The internet made stale printed materials obsolete with its instantly(near live) updating, very low cost of production and distribution, and it's portability/convenience.
People still read books, "magazines", news papers, and news letters. But, more and more they read the electronic/online versions. They've been trained to use and expect the content to be free and they're very unwilling to pay for the old printed media.
Oh, one more thing. A big part of the reason that this author has trouble selling his books is that he's a bad writer. Bad writers have always had trouble selling their crappy books, unless they were college texts and thus mandatory purchases. But, even in the case of the college text, the internet continues to erode their market.
Television did not kill the print industry and 'video didn't kill the radio star', yet.
For some reason, this reminds me of the title of the movie - Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Sounds like the author is having an existential crisis. I've never had a conservative friend worry about such things. That leads me to believe the author is in an echo chamber. Probably feels a lot like how Neo felt at the beginning of The Matrix. Something fundamental feels off but can't put one's finger on it...
when you're too young to make decisions for yourself. This is how things like the puritanical work ethic survives repeated cycles of long term (20+years) technology unemployment. It's also why, as Richard Dawkins pointed out, your religion is generally decided by where your born.
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You should have learned how to summarize in grade 4. What shitty USA public school did you attend??
A bit better than it having been created by a single mind. Hmmm?
I'm Italian, I am good at summarising, but again, not everything can be summarised to a few words.
But in Italian school, when I attended it, we were trained to read a lot of big books, so I'm used to that. I actually like reading books, both in Italian and English (the only languages I know, apart from programming ones).
They are stopping teaching kids to read in Europe too nowadays.
As I said anyway there's nothing strictly wrong with that, things do change, not really any faster than in the past actually, and we are not any wiser than in the past at predicting consequences of change.
and constipation of logic.
I admit to not really fully reading the article, but I didn't see any actual data that backs up the claim that reading is down, literature is dead, etc.
Hasn't it been this way for.. essentially forever? What percentage of the population has actually read Milton, or Lord of the Flies, or even Vonnegut? Perhaps the authors bubble has just been broken, and he's realizing that the "unwashed masses" don't pay attention to this stuff, and are more interested in whatever the latest version of "Jerry Springer" is.
For gods sake, the article is in the freaking Paris Review. Which is one of those "literati" magazines. The kind read by people who like thinking, but don't really like analytical thinking or data, or science. And are generally sort of lost in their own little world of other people who read the same magazines.
TV they could kind of ignore.. but the internet is textual, and magazines are all publishing in them.. so it broke them out of their bubble. But they didn't really want to admit they lived in a bubble, so they invented this story that the world suddenly changed.
Games of the very near future are pushing the boundaries of creating worlds and could be providing platforms for a writer to create memorable stories in these new universes. Multiple parties would have to step up for such a scenario to happen, though.
Just to be more precise, I could go to extremes and summarise Moby Dick to:
Ishmael and another guy meet the day before joining a whaling expedition on a ship name Pequod. They don't know the captain of the ship is obsessed with killing a white whale which ate his leg. He makes the whole crew hunt for this white whale. When they finally find it there's a big struggle, in which the whale destroys the Pequod and the captain, who was trying to stab it with an harpoon, but gets tangled in the rope attached to it and dragged away by the whale. After all this Ishmael is the only surviving person from the expedition.
I think you'll agree that a lot of information is lost in such a summary, and it's no substitute for reading the book.
(I could be a little less or more terse not changing the concept)
Will someone with some editorial skill please proof read that title and synopsis.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. -- Sir Francis Bacon
I believe literature is having less of an impact, and the answer as to why can be found in the article, but not the summary:
Less than four hundred years ago—barely a century and a half after Gutenberg—John Milton could still pride himself without exaggeration on having read every book then available, the entire history of written thought accessible to a single mind. When I was in college, a friend and I worked on a short film, never finished, in which Milton somehow found himself brought forward in time to lower Manhattan’s Strand bookstore, where the sheer volume of titles (“18 Miles of Books” is the store’s slogan) provoked a kind of mental overload, causing him to run screaming from the store out into Broadway, only to be struck down by a New York City bus.
If Milton were to have a mental overload standing in Manhattan's Strand bookstore, his mind would probably explode at the sheer volume of works to be found online. There's so much information, we become conditioned to nibble everything we find, but digest nothing. How can we appreciate a novel when the fickle nature of the internet leaves everything feeling trite?
The only thing you ommited which is kind of important is the captain's name.
I just now notice the omission, and while the captain name is important in the book, it's not important in my description. I could also leave out the name Ishmael. I actually also told nothing of Quequeg and his coffin, which are important in the book. But Ahab, the story of Quequeg and of a bunch of other characters are important only in the full book, which build the story to the final climax, telling us a lot of details of the characters, making them interesting.
Ahab's name is important because you like (or despise...) him, thanks to all the small things you are told about him in the book. The emotions that the book conveys cannot be summarised. The name itself has no relation to the raw facts of the book.
Short titles
make it snappy
so the readers
all are happy.
-----------------------Burma Shave
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
And the interesting trivia that the founders of Starbucks at first choose Pekuod as a brand name. Now, having a name for a coffee shop chain that sounds like pee on reflection was not a wise idea.
So they went with Starbuck (one of the sailors).
I did not know that, but suspected there was a connection.
Wherever did the "intensive purposes" misspelling come from, anyway? Never saw it before I started reading /.
Answering that question will cost you a nominal egg.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Someone Read That You Should Capitalise Every Word In A Headline But Did Not Stop To Think How Stupid That Looks When The Headline Goes On And On.
And On.
What this argument overlooks, of course, is that literary culture as we know it was the product of a technological revolution, one that began with Johannes Gutenberg's invention of movable type. We take books and mass literacy for granted, but in reality, they are a recent iteration, going back not even a millennium.
1) Before that there was oral tradition and the written word pretty much eviscerated that in western society. There was no reason to sit around waiting for the bard or minstrel to tell stories when you could go read them. Plays, and narrative song survived for a long while because literacy rates were low; not because people wanted to sit thru Everyman #886. As literacy increase the play became an art form and the narrative song became the ballad also an art. Here were are witnessing the death of print; Video killed the mass market paper back star. TL:DR - Things change and I don't like it.
2) More print media is probably produced and consumed than ever (even if not the long form novella) its just you can't make money at it on ad revenue because it competes for the attention with all the other kinda of media out there. Oh and maybe there is too much of that? Maybe society is harmed by the fact that we dont all read the same books; in the last decade we have stopped watching the same movies and TV too; in case you had noticed with the fragmenting of cable, amazon, and netflix. I think this actually quite sad because it actually divides us into little tribes. I suspect the cause is there is too much money in media - we have to many laws protecting it and to many cartels pushing access to giant libraries or bundling huge amounts of content in all or nothing propositions. All of this is causing society to over produce this things.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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How do things stick? You start by making a great work, and it being at the right place at the right time. Beyond that, society will determine the wheat from the chaff. But you have to start with a great work.
To make a great work it takes practice, with a LOT of failures along the way.
Also, the immediacy of society may not account for long-term success. Keep in mind that The Car's "You might think." beat out Michael Jackson's "Thriller" for MTV Video of the Year! Guess which one is in the Library of Congress as being culturally significant?
Keep trying!
In reality, there have always been a very large number of non-readers. People came to realize that it improved a lot of things... and then, since the eighties, there's been the attack on public education, which is where a lot of people whose parents don't read learned to read.
I mean, if you read, you might get ideas that conflict with your parents, or other authorities, like, I dunno, *belinving* in the US Constitution, or the Rights of Man, and expect elected and appointed officials to actually *do* what they say.
But, that's ok, go back to your emojis and (not) influence anyone, much less the world.
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"...gorilla in the midst ...", is that a saying?
I only read the summary and the comments that followed.
I see several facets.
News provided at the speed of reality via websites doesnâ(TM)t allow time for contemplation in most cases. We read some, hit refresh, and move on to the next story. I do this. How many news articles do you read a day? How many times a day do you refresh Slashdot?
As well, most of us put on blinders and have a handful of sources for information. Many times this serves to reinforce our views of the world; and many time it prevents us from seeing things that are actually relevant to us.
News on the TV, specifically the cable channels, is inane. Thereâ(TM)s still no time to think because some asshat is droning on about his/her opinion, usually as part of a group. I donâ(TM)t watch it.
Movies, TV, Books. Holy content Batman! Too much of everything. I use BookBub to get cheap books for the Kindle, and I read pulp fiction zombie and military fiction stuff. Everyday I get an email with 10 books in those genres that are on sale. Different every day. Every day.
And kids and YouTube videos, holy shit! Massively degrades any ability to focus for any period of time.
Oh, and social media.
As a society we donâ(TM)t take the time to contemplate and think. This is why I love camping and take my kids as much as possible. To get away from the information stream and the ADHD that it is.
BlameBillCosby.com
John Milton could still pride himself without exaggeration on having read every book then available, the entire history of written thought accessible to a single mind.
1) The entire history of written thought includes the 500,000+ manuscripts from the Library of Alexandria which were lost about 1400 years before Milton was born, so there is no way this was or ever will be accessible to a single mind.
2) Every book available during Milton's life would include over 43,000 manuscripts in the largest Chinese library at the time. Milton never traveled to China, so there's no way he read any of those.
When you remove the information, that's all that's left.
Film at 11
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I'm sorry. I thought that only happened with Javascript frameworks.
I bet a huge amount of money he did not read every book written in China, Japan, or India.
Title says it all.
What's on reddit right now, again?
-Styopa
And all this time I thought they were Battlestar Galactica fans!
Russian propaganda is fairly consistent: capitalism sucks and we should all do what the russians say. Which is fight each other.
Last month, I invited some doctoral philosopher friends to discuss what kind of (very common) logical fallacy it is that you're making there.
The consensus was "False Equivalence".
Just because each generation has one similar aspect (e.g., this complaint) does not mean that they are equivalent in all other aspects (e.g., intellect).
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Me too. I read the story in an excellent book called "Etymologicon" by Marc Forsyth. Strongly recommended read, you will be interesting at parties.
Is there connection between testicles and Testament (yes!) with added avocado and orchid (those mean testicle in Aztec and Greek).
When you say for a scientists that he/she "knows his/her shit" are you etymologically correct (yes!).
Why the old brits adopted the Viking word for cloud, i.e. "sky" to mean, well...sky in English? Obviously on that wretched island there is no difference between the two concepts!
And then there was the list of words that John Milton single handedly invented which boggled my mind. So many words we take for granted and imagine that people have been using for millennia are invented yesterday.
Great stuff!
Great suggestion thanks! Looks like everything he wrote is an interesting read.
Me too. I read the story in an excellent book called "Etymologicon" by Marc Forsyth. Strongly recommended read, you will be interesting at parties.I
So curious how party people react to such snippets.
> Yes, EVERY generation, everywhere has said this.
No. Before Gutenberg, but after 300CE or so, in "Western" cultures it was widely believed that the remnants of Greek and Roman ideas were shreds of a golden age, and in some ways that was true.
Yes, there's "our in group is better because ingroupism self-reinforces" but that doesn't mean it applies to every group, always, in every circumstance. Then dunning-kruger wouldn't be a thing, because "I'm/we're the best" would be universal, not an occasional mistake with trends.
LOL: captcha=rectum