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Reading Ourselves to Death

thenewatlantis.com

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Re: Reading Ourselves to Death

#71

Post by mbg721 »

tpoacher wrote: post #62
mbg721 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed that when I spend a lot of time reading dystopian fiction, the sense of despair from that dystopia creeps into how I react to real-life. Not all fiction seems to work like that for me, but that style in particular leaves me looking up and going "Whoa," as I readjust to reality. So I do get where the author is coming from here; I think if you spend a significant part of your life in any constructed univ…

It doesn't help that all the dystopian scenarios are being made into reality these days though ...

Is that actually more true now than it was in, say, the 1950s, or is it just that pessimism is the preferred way for educated people to fit in?

Re: Reading Ourselves to Death

#72

Post by singularity2001 »

>> The journalist Nick Bilton has estimated that each day the average Internet user now sees as many as 490,000 words — more than War and Peace.

That makes no sense. I need many weeks reading War and Peace but rarely spend more than 24 hours a day reading the internet.

Re: Reading Ourselves to Death

#73

Post by PKop »

insightcheck wrote: post #43
PKop wrote: post #17

Author talks of text as abstraction compared to "edited" version of reality of visual media. But videos, movies, TV shows are also abstractions, possibly worse in that they more easily trick our subconscious into perceiving them as more real than words on a page while still being constructions of a "reality" based on the creator's point of view. So people think they have an understanding of the world based on fiction…

Sidney Lumet's film "Network" (1976) explores the idea of "hyperreality" in an accessible way, where people model their lives in reaction to relationships shown on television. >"I think this is odd, at least if over done, as if the constructed media representation is somehow evidence of anything true" Constructed media representations, like clips of movies, can still be quite useful for introducing an idea where the…

>can still be quite useful

Absolutely, no question. And personally I love film as an art form and even I fall into the trap of referencing film as some model for the real world.

It's hard to articulate the nuance but visual media/art certainly still exist in the real world, and we have to account for whatever it is they communicate to us, and it is something. There can be something real and reflective that comes from them, some insight on the human condition and (maybe less trustworthy) historical accounts of events.

It is just that to the degree something is visual and contains moving images seems to correlate with how much people perceive it as strictly factual or direct representation of reality. Whereas with books and texts people seem to have a healthy arms-length relationship with it being a depiction of a constructed reality or an abstraction. I think there are studies that sharing an experience watching a movie has a significant emotional response amongst viewers where that's similar to real life event. It fools your brain better than other forms. And since we live amidst near infinite quantity of films and shows, while people's actual lived experience of certain types of human struggle in developed world are less than in past, the disconnect of hyperreality becomes greater.

Re: Reading Ourselves to Death

#74

Post by purplerabbit »

jamiek88 wrote: post #34
purplerabbit wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media posts may be bad for you brain, but my personal opinion of Gravity’s Rainbow is that ~everyone who “enjoys” that painful slog does so because of the “literary” status “enjoying” Gravity’s Rainbow affords them

Is it not enough that you just didn’t enjoy it? You have to tell yourself that everyone who did enjoy it is just pretending? Why?

There’s definitely some fairness to your callout. To make a long story short, I was once quite invested in the genre of literary fiction, and eventually became disillusioned when I realized I had been sucked into a prestige game. My old bitterness comes out in my comment

Re: Reading Ourselves to Death

#75

Post by sebastialonso »

mcdermott wrote: post #65
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start with The Crying of Lot 49, which is dense-ish but short, then Bleeding Edge, which is longer but closer to the storyline of a traditional novelist, and is semi-sci-fi. I then proceeded to Inherent Vice (because of the movie) and then Vineland. Vineland was difficult and heavy in parts, but I enjoyed it overall (the whole chapter on how the protagonist describes the receiving of a business card feels like some k…

My gateway drug was the Inherent Vice movie, after that I started with the Crying of Lot 49 and workes my way through his oeuvre. That's when I realized what literature was for and started reading like a madman ever since. Ony Marcel Proust perhaps bests Pynchon.

I feel like I've accidentally stumbled into a secret club. What's the deal with this Pynchon fellow?

Re: Reading Ourselves to Death

#76

Post by dingosity »

Please. The author makes no claims on the quality of what is read and suggests that reading a thousand twenty-word tweets is the same as reading a twenty-thousand word novella. Poppycock!

The joy of long form text is (when done skillfully) it can take the reader on a journey in which brain chemistry is gradually exercised. Moving through a world of possibilities, it sets your subconscious mind up to refute or reinforce perception.

Tweets, LinkedIn posts, Facebook posts... they all give you a hit of dopamine and maybe a jolt of unrealized fear (or maybe a zap of sexy-time lizard-brain fun, depending on what part of twitter you hang out in...) The major social media sites (and many "news" sites) have morphed over to money machines converting human attention to cash by way of ad sales (or investment capital.) Why people feel like they have to subject themselves to that, I don't know. I like my brain chemistry the way it is.

Words don't kill people, people kill people (sometimes with words.)

Re: Reading Ourselves to Death

#77

Post by HKH2 »

goalieca wrote: post #9
mcdermott wrote: post #3

I think what you read is the key here. Mindless reading of text messages, news headlines and social media posts is very different cognitively than reading actual literature, something like Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

People spend too much time in their heads and not enough in the real world. We used to say people need to stop reading books and start talking to people.

People need to cut back on fiction. Even things intended to be non-fiction are fictionalized; can you name one documentary without background music?

Re: Reading Ourselves to Death

#78

Post by brezelnbitte »

Absurd. Reading and writing is the only reason we’re not stuck in caves. It’s allowed us to create a shared consciousness across time that has been necessary for progress. So the benefits of literacy certainly outweigh any risks.

Furthermore, how is oral communication any less of an abstraction? And what about the quality of the text.

Also, reading is reflection. We’re not investing words like food.

Article poses an interesting question but fails to explore sufficiently.

Re: Reading Ourselves to Death

#79

Post by tpoacher »

mbg721 wrote: post #71
tpoacher wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't help that all the dystopian scenarios are being made into reality these days though ...

Is that actually more true now than it was in, say, the 1950s, or is it just that pessimism is the preferred way for educated people to fit in?

The typical dystopian novel envisaged states of complete surveillance and technology turning against humanity. This is far more possible now with internet and AI than it was in the 50s, and we're already seeing the very same technologies envisaged in those novels being created and turned against humanity right on point (drones, surveillance, loss of privacy, mass media manipulation, etc).

It's not a statement about life being better or worse than the 50s per se; that can be debated. But we're definitely in a far more "dystopian" state of affairs than we were in the 50s.

Re: Reading Ourselves to Death

#80

Post by BLKNSLVR »

sebastialonso wrote: post #75
mcdermott wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My gateway drug was the Inherent Vice movie, after that I started with the Crying of Lot 49 and workes my way through his oeuvre. That's when I realized what literature was for and started reading like a madman ever since. Ony Marcel Proust perhaps bests Pynchon.

I feel like I've accidentally stumbled into a secret club. What's the deal with this Pynchon fellow?

You kinda have to read some of his work to know, and it does feel like a secret club with fairly exclusive membership - I don't really belong, I've only ventured into the shallows thus far :)

But the deal is:

Prose that creates a jungle-like density of meaning through the use of long sentences, creatively unusual descriptions using unexpected combinations of words with meanings just slightly twisted to fit into the size of the 'box that's available'.

Prose that acutely both describes and evokes the feel of specific times and places.

I probably miss more than half of the subtlety of his work through lack of familiarity with the 'time and place' stuff. I enjoy the structure created by the delicately woven words, however.

An abridged quoting of Hunter S. Thompson for a particularly memorable evocation of time and place (because this quote is more coherent and memorable than Pynchon):

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime...San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of...

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons nobody really understands at the time--and which never explains in retrospect, what actually happened...

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda...You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost SEE the high water mark--that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Full excerpt here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1074-strange-memories-on-th...

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