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It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

theatlantic.com

101–110 of 349 posts

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cinema is dying? Hollywood is on track to have its best year since 2019. Where do people come up with this stuff?

Inflation adjusted outcomes and overall ticket sales down 30-40% Overall ticket sales Globally are down 46% since 2000. Please learn to tell financial engineering headlines from reality.

Ticket prices seem to have increased slower than general inflation

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#102
post #11

I refuse to believe that the decline of our education system is some inevitable, intractable problem.

Decline since when? A few hundred years ago most people were illiterate farmers.

Within the last 30 years? Last 20? We had a high point, and we're not there any longer – certainly not in my state (Iowa).

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which could, for the most part, be boiled down to 2 hour-long segments. so much is stretched out for the sake of padding. the good news is that scrubbing through shows is possible — it is usually painfully clear when to stop & watch at double speed — & time otherwise lost is recovered in this way.

Not really. Movies are good for plot oriented stories, with clear beginning, middle, and end. But they are not ideal for more character driven or lore oriented content. Long slow burning stories told over many episodes let you really show many facets of characters and also opportunities to hint at a much larger world than what can be shown within 2 hours.

I miss when episodes were episodic. Watched Deep Space 9 recently, and it was such a blast: Characters developed and had arches, but there were no episodes where nothing happened! In more recently produced tv series there are so many episodes where nothing happens. There is no story, just vibes. In DS9 every episode was a story with a beginning, middle and end, exploring some idea.

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#104
Written communication serves separable purposes:

* Replicating speech, Archiving speech, and separating the acts of speaking and listening from each other. There are alternatives to written format.

* Speech that can be edited easily, until it is perfected.

* Speech that be sped up, slowed down, and jumped around with random access and search.

* Silent speech.

These features can be achieved with alternative technologies.

Written communication also has drawbacks. It is a lossy compression of spoken speech.

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#105
post #23

It's been my impression that classic literature is going the same way as painting and other forms of high art. It was certainly a great display of human intellectual prowess and artistic capacity in bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today? Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.

I think it's mostly due to mobile phones. Most people seem to spend a substantial amount of their free time staring at their phone screen rather than engaging with books or other forms of entertainment. Phones being bite sized entertainment orientated is probably changing the way people feel about longer forms.

I read novels voraciously, all of them on my phone. I haven't bought a paper book for myself in maybe a decade.

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#106
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decline since when? A few hundred years ago most people were illiterate farmers.

Were they though? Or were they only illiterate because literacy was measured in Latin not their native language? We know that historically that did happen, and it is hard to figure out what was done. Even today, most talking about literacy rates are using a very high level read skills to make things look bad, when most people can read just fine for the normal level things are written in. I'm near illiterate if you on…

Literacy doesn't mean your ability to speak, it means your ability to read/write. Formal schooling for the masses is a very recent invention.

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#107
post #7

For me, reading used to be a way to enjoy part of my free time. Nowadays is still that but it’s also a way to relax. Even though I don’t have accounts in the main social media networks (instagram, fb, twitter, youtube, etc) I still consume them indirectly on a weekly basis (e.g., i like to watch videoclips in YT, a friend sends me a twitter link, etc). It makes me anxious. I’ve realised that consuming in tiny bits (s…

I'm afraid I am addicted to short-form video and wish I could go back to spending more of my free-time reading books.

It's funny, I signed up for tiktok when I was curious about the hype, explored a bit for the science / history / educational content I normally watch on youtube and found there was almost nothing, and what little there was was of much lower quality.

I deleted my account after about 15m of looking, and hilariously enough, a tiktok researcher reached out, and actually paid me ~ $200 to understand why I bounced off the platform.

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that literate people can recover from a period of not reading (books) at all. I recently had more than a year of not reading any books that was interrupted when I found about The Culture series. I read Use of Weapons and had to read all novels from that universe. After that I tried to find some books similar to them, tried to read some recommended ones (didn't finish any of them) and stopped reading. In my ca…

Unfortunately there really aren't any other books like the culture series. You might enjoy Banks' "The Algebraist" and the completely unrelated though similarly named "The Alchemist".

As I like how Banks writes and they are not directly related to The Culture they won't have to meet the expectations of the others I tried.

Thanks, will read them.

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#109

>Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do. Most of the news are not worth reading. I listen to news when eating, and I am very glad I don't have to waste my reading span on this crap.

You're not reading the right news sources then. I find reuters, the AP and such still worthwhile.

Re: It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

#110

> Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book I feel like if it took me 20hr to place a bet I'm probably not doing much of that either. Anecdotal, but my 7y/o loves reading. She's flying through series' and it's getting pricey. I guess she falls in the 16% of people who enjoy it.

It does. People who bet on sports sink hundreds of hours into forums and consuming visual content. Placing a bet takes 30 seconds, deciding what to bet on takes people a very long time. As long as reading a book.

I think you're vastly overestimating the amount of time people put into researching. A very small minority, sure, but most sports bettors look at the lines and pick.
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