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? 134
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.
I Have No Idea (Score:1)
What Are You Asking And Why Capitalize Every Word
Re:I Have No Idea (Score:4, Funny)
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Why Capitalize Every Word
You must be new here ... article titles have been presented that way here nearly since day 1 (even in times when the first letter should not be capitalized). It's their standard editorial style, damned the torpedoes and all that.
Short titles. (Score:5, Insightful)
Short titles.
Concise expressions of ideas.
Not using 30 words when maybe 6 will do.
That's how you avoid Information Overload and Volatility.
This (Score:2)
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Burma Shave
Burma Shave [Re:Short titles.] (Score:3)
Short titles
make it snappy
so the readers
all are happy.
-----------------------Burma Shave
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Problem is not all idea and concepts can be condensed to less than 10 words.
Sometimes you actually need a wall of text to fully convey your idea or concept.
Having 99% of the people refusing to read anything more than 160 characters limits the written word they can access to only the sources providing trivial ideas and concepts.
Nothing strictly wrong with that, but I think anyone can agree the world cannot be fully described by a bunch of such trivial concepts.
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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, a
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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
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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
Re: Problem is Bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
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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 ther
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p>Sometimes you actually need a wall of text to fully convey your idea or concept.
Yes, but the title needn't fully convey the idea or concept (if it did, you wouldn't even need the article, just the title).
the title only conveys what the article is going to be about.
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Problem is not all idea and concepts can be condensed to less than 10 words.
I am my worst editor. I tend to drone on and on. But if I'm ruthless with myself, I find I can boil even complex thoughts into a sticky note. Or an index card.
You have to know your audience. Scholars don't mind long writing. Most people, however, aren't scholars.. and I've found that outside of nerd and tech and academic cultures, most people are just not interested in learning. Sad but true. Or maybe it's *thinking* they're not interested in? Hm.
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Idea fragmentation.
I blame Twitter.
Re:Yes...and? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Speaking of bloat on Wikipedia. I sometimes will get bored and spend some time clicking the random article link just to see if I can find anything new and interesting to read. And honestly the number of pages devoted to athletes, and athletic league seasons is mind boggling. The only subject that seems to compete on number of pages is moth species.
Loss of Reading (Score:4)
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.
Re:Loss of Reading (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm, where have I seen this before?
Oh, yeah! I first saw it in the 70's. Then again in the 80's. And the 90's. And the oughts.
Of course, back then, people were pointing out how they'd been seeing it in the 50's and 60's. Or the 30's and 40's.
And then there were the people saying it in the 1890's....
Yeah, I could go on for a while....
Re:Loss of Reading (Score:4)
This isn't rocket science, but if you prefer research on things like reading comprehension levels, and how smart phones have detrimental affects on cognition and memory, there is a lot of that around.
Your comments remind me of something someone said to me when I mentioned that I read a lot of history.
"history is written by the victors"
A sort of simplistic brush off, which shows the inability to have a nuanced view of history or current events.
Your points actually make my point.
Re:Loss of Reading (Score:4)
Pretty much, yeah. American society has not been coarsened or dumbed down in the last generation or two.
Yes, EVERY generation, everywhere has said this. And it always reduces down to "you kids get off my lawn!"
No, disagreeing with your parents (or their generation's ideals) is not the same as "dumbed down" or "coarsened". No more than it was when your parents generation disagreed with THEIR parents.
Nor is not caring about something your parents thought was important. A lot of things that looked important back in the day (and "back in the day" goes back at least to Roman times - I remember reading a translation of a Roman letter that reduced to "the kids these days don't respect their elders, they're dirty, their sexual habits are obscene, etc"), and turned out to be, in the long run, not terribly significant....
Note also that the majority of people disagreeing with what YOU think is important an example of "dumbed down" or "coarsened". That's also been going on forever, for any value of "you" and "important" that you care to mention....
Re:Loss of Reading (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I'm not trying to offend, but your statement pretty much reads like something which proves his point :). But perhaps that's just perspective for you.
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Its swings and roundabouts though. If you have a loopy idea its much easier to find other people with similar loopy ideas (flat earthers, and other conspiracy theories, come to mind). This can help to make fringe weirdness seem much less fringe. Its like a legitimacy bonus.
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Would you say that American society has not been coarsened and dumbed down in the last generation or two?
I would say it has not been, yes. Instead, I would say that the coarser, dumber parts of society are considerably more visible now than they ever have been in history. And there are a lot more people.
There aren't more coarse idiots in society now per capita. There's just more people and Twitter. When John Milton could claim he'd read every book available, there were a thousand assholes down the street who couldn't read at all. Nowadays, you can claim you've read every journal article published in your
False Equivalence (Score:2)
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).
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"fewer people are reading"
Plato complained that it was reading which was dumbing down the youth of the day 24 centuries ago.
How Do Things Stick To Us in a Culture (Score:4, Interesting)
"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.
Yet, we're not victims (Score:1)
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.
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The thing about your blame pedantry is that it's flawed on an important point:
It suggests that one should then address "everyone buying" to correct the scenario.
If there's a new fad hyping up - some kind of weird snuff, probably graphic, say, being done by Li'l Rapgod - and the phenomenon is dribbling into ads or the facetweets or TV air time or t-shirts or school classrooms or whatever... ...then do you really think the best course of action is to tell every Joe Sixpack, one by one, that "you are into some
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It is impossible for them to sell it to you, unless you decide to buy.
It's hard to avoid buying. Some restaurants play cable TV news on large monitors, others sports. Even grocery stores play RIAA-controlled music over the PA system when an announcement isn't being made. And a fraction of your bill goes toward paying for the licenses to put those up.
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When's the last time you saw a movie from Edgar Allen Poe?
No idea who the guy is.
Edgar Allan Poe, on the other hand...
See, you don't even remember names correctly.
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No idea who the guy is. Edgar Allan Poe, on the other hand...
What about David Allan Coe?
How did slashdot allow such a long title? (Score:2)
Click Bait fo the Paries Review (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
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IMNSHO, The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby are wonderful examples of exquisitely written books that really do not matter. The ennui of the aristocrats is not automatically profound. I suppose someone who is intrigued by the historical development of the novel in America might care, but I do not see why that is more important than other historical topics of study.
Stop. (Score:2)
Express your ideas with the mediums you have, not the mediums you want.
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Considering that recommendation, we would still live in caves and not have started painting their walls...
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*facepalm* You extracted precisely the incorrect meaning.
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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?
For all intensive purposes he makes a good point.
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"For all intents and purposes..."
Wherever did the "intensive purposes" misspelling come from, anyway? Never saw it before I started reading /.
egg corns [Re:Gorilla in the midst?] (Score:2)
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.
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Wherever did the "intensive purposes" misspelling come from, anyway? Never saw it before I started reading /.
To "whoosh" or not to "whoosh", that is the question...
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God, yes, this was awful. I THINK (could be wrong) the "Gorillas in the Mist" connection is an accident, although maybe influenced by that phrase, and he has confused "the elephant in the room" with thing about the 800-pound gorilla. (Where does an 800-pound gorilla sleep? Anywhere it wants to.) This confusion is pretty common.
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It's conflating the elephant in the room and the 800 pound gorilla which is often done.
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Handy slogans vs. long winded arguments (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
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Well, I guess that proves my point, then. ;)
Blatantly False Premise (Score:1)
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 sti
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Score:3)
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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.
Conservatives don't have echo chambers? I think the existential crisis is correct but the reason is far more basic than political leanings, it's that the next generation doesn't actually care all that much about what your generation did or liked. A generation is ~30 years, do you see many kids playing video games from 1988? Teens listening to music from 1988? Watch TV or movies from 1988? How many read books that were popular in 1988? Dress the way they did in 1988? Sure, occasionally something old comes ba
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It's impossible for conservatives to seal themselves in echo chambers. The left wing media is too loud.
You've never met my mother. Or anyone else over the age of 75. It is trivially easy for conservatives to seal themselves in echo chambers. They simply do not use the Internet. At all. They watch Fox News when they watch cable TV at all, but their primary source of news is talk radio. Which is the poster child for an echo chamber, and it is overwhelmingly dominated by neo-conservatives.
All you need to do is go to Facebook or Google News to see what the Left wants you to hear.
I would bet a steak dinner my mother has never done either in her entire life. She doesn't know that Google even has
They're pounded into your skull (Score:2)
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Where MY born?? I think not.
Your inability to spell aside, one's religion is most often decided by where one's parents were born....
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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...
ROFL!
A quote... (Score:2)
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 h
I see two views on this: (Score:3)
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.
"Simple" doesn't mean "correct" (Score:2)
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 t
Too Much Information (Score:2)
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 pre
Emotions become the culture (Score:1)
Advertising ruins everything (Score:2)
Film at 11
TL;DR (Score:2)
Title says it all.
What's on reddit right now, again?