> What made the fiction literary was it spoke the language of memory, where the reader inhabited the experience of the characters, and this changed how readers experienced the world after.
>
> — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882341
People don't turn to books for this sort of experience anymore. People are not "literary minded". For the average person, interpolating another person's experience against their own through the written word is counterintuitive if not impossible and detached.
It takes a literary mind to feel through text. Electronic media of all sorts, aside from long form text displayed electronically is just that; electrifying.
I think that the quote I pulled from motohagiography applies to all writing and when we go further:
> Writing on the internet is participatory, impersonal, performative, and anti-intimate.
The cultural decline of all writing becomes more obvious.
Anyone who cares about this sort of stuff needs to understand that their brain is rewired but their spirit still craves the same old stuff that it sought out for when the mind could stomach total absorption in a dry block of pulp.
We are living in the tower of Babel. No one speaks the same "language" anymore. I truly believe this was the true metaphor behind that story. Once a civilization reaches a certain level of standard wealth people hyper converge on their personal beliefs to the point where they can literally no longer speak about other forms of personal belief or preference that conflicts with their own. And they no longer are coerced into going along with another belief system (compromise) due to economic need from the majority. At that point the civilization unravels due to lack of coherent direction.
Look at all the arguments about definitions of clearly defined words in modern politics.
Even so, mass media today is better posed to present a shared language.
I'd go as far as to think that there is a shared language in society today, but it's more like athletes jawing off amongst each other than something like what we expect the effects of culture and art to be.
In my original comment, I said that I believe that our brains are rewired but our spirits still crave the same things as before.
Tech changes the actions and reasonings behind how our nature is exercised, at the material level.
Now, if you don't believe in the material/immaterial dichotomy that typifies man then what I'm saying may not register.
I'm not sure if this applies to you, but either way I'm curious what made you make the claim that took us in this direction because it's apparent that you've noticed a logical step that I was only aware of subconsciously.
I vaguely recall some sociology and media theory strands that make arguments similar to the quoted post—that we are entering or have already entered an era of post-literacy. Our new language is a language of images, (tiktok, instagram), immediacy, and literalness (does anyone even understand allegory anymore? Does the average piece of media ever express a metaphor?). I don't have numbers on it, but my teacher friends tell me that the typical student's reading comprehension skills have tanked in the past few years.
It's not just reading comprehension, it's the imagination that goes with it.
Text is active. It triggers the imagination. Visual imagery - especially electronic imagery - is consumed passively. What you see is what you get.
Especially with Gen Z, there's been a catastrophic collapse in the public's ability to imagine anything that hasn't been pre-digested by Hollywood movies, video games, D&D, and anime.
It's the same stock imagery over and over and over.
Older culture is "boring" because it doesn't follow the standard tropes, and that makes it incomprehensible.
It's a bizarre kind of deja nostalgia - the only futures that can be imagined are the ones that have been imagined already.
Older works often conform less closely to the tropes, because the tropes weren't established at that point. When a medium or genre is new it often goes through a Cambrian explosion phase where there are all kinds of wildly varied pieces, and then things settle down and coalesce on the specific approaches that have proven successful.
I wonder if people are downvoting you in good faith because I think you're on to something. My assumption is that denigrating mass media and pop culture comes across as "elitist".
Oh well. I mean, for the person who can look around and feel disdain toward these things, they deserve whatever shred of dignity the allegation subscribes them to.
"Second Order Illiteracy" is precisely what cripples imagination, or the ability to perceive things beyond the immediate senses. Passively consuming electronic media does the heavy lifting that the literary mind achieves.
> It's a bizarre kind of deja nostalgia - the only futures that can be imagined are the ones that have been imagined already.
If we toss the word "capitalism" into the fray of what you're saying I think this is what Mark Fisher meant by the "Slow cancellation of the future".
Possibly the idea is just too new / people who haven't seen it think it's just dunking on the young generation again. But for example there's an unexpected trend on social media just within the past month of a large amount of Gen Z not being able to read "third person omniscient" (a term I hadn't heard before but is pretty much just what it sounds like; from examples appears to be how all fiction I've read is written).
People don't turn to books for this sort of experience anymore. People are not "literary minded". For the average person, interpolating another person's experience against their own through the written word is counterintuitive if not impossible and detached.
It takes a literary mind to feel through text. Electronic media of all sorts, aside from long form text displayed electronically is just that; electrifying.
I think that the quote I pulled from motohagiography applies to all writing and when we go further:
> Writing on the internet is participatory, impersonal, performative, and anti-intimate.
The cultural decline of all writing becomes more obvious.
Anyone who cares about this sort of stuff needs to understand that their brain is rewired but their spirit still craves the same old stuff that it sought out for when the mind could stomach total absorption in a dry block of pulp.