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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.
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.
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
i dON'T kNOW, iT sEEMS tO wORK bETTER tHIS wAY.
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?
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 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.
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).
Idea fragmentation startet at least in the 18th century, when the Age of the Polymath came to an end. Since then, it became impossible to study every subject deeply enough to hold a meaningful conversation with a specialist of each of the Sciences and Arts. Now, even reading all articles of a single language like English, German or French in Wikipedia takes more time than a human lives on Earth.