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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.
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?
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).
Pretty much, yeah. American society has not been coarsened or dumbed down in the last generation or two.
Fair enough, you give your opinion, however I disagree wholeheartedly with it.
In my opinion, American society has been coarsened or dumbed down in the last generation or two, and greatly so.
Whether you look at how our political discourse has "evolved", or how easily people take offense at things, it is quite obvious that Americans today are less understanding, less polite, etc; than they were even ten years ago, let alone 30 or 40.
Now, as I said previously, I don't blame this totally on the fact that less people read today. I just feel that because less people read, less people have the more deliberate mindset to absorb information, and to have the patience that reading requires. Also, I feel that reading books in particular gives people a broader perspective on many different topics.
The loss of this broader perspective, the loss of patience and the loss of cognition in the population as a whole has accelerated this coarsening and dumbing down.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range