131–140 of 331 posts
I think people still read, but the problem is largely that people read older literature, meaning anything older than 5-10 years at the very least. People are very hesitant to read something recent because it may very well be AI slop. It's a crisis in literature. How do we fix this?
I think people still read, but the problem is largely that people read older literature, meaning anything older than 5-10 years at the very least. People are very hesitant to read something recent because it may very well be AI slop. It's a crisis in literature. How do we fix this?
I don't read less, but I do read fewer books. It is hard to find a book that is the best source for what I want know about, and that changes too frequently now to outlive the time it takes to read a book. This is what you'd expect in a world where the sheer volume of things that are important to know about has grown beyond a sustainable capacity. What has taken their place, for better or for worse, are various inform…
Fiction doesn’t age in the same way.
Some people came from houses that had books in them and others did not. Accessibility to books was important, you would just pick things off the parent's shelves out of curiosity, and learn what you liked.
Not everyone was culturally rich even if they were financially well-off, you could come from a poor background where the house had books, and reading whilst bored was a form of education not everyone had.
If you lived in the countryside and needed to walk miles to see a friend then you tended to read more than those that had friends next door. They had sports and general shenanigans to get up to, and would not be reading as much.
I don't see those moaning about kids today downloading The Complete Works of Shakespeare from the Gutenberg library to read it on open source recycled e-screen tablets, whilst eating their quinoa and jackfruit.
Leave those kids alone means protecting them from online nonsense but there is no going back to the 1970s or earlier when kids would spend hours immersed in a book purely for the pleasure of it.
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Fiction doesn’t age in the same way.
My biggest problem with fiction books is that it is hard to build suspense when I can clearly see I have another 100 pages to go or if I know that it's a series. After I realized that in my late teens fiction was very difficult to keep at consistently.
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> I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube Most of the people I’ve known who struggled with doomscrolling had established a similar set of social media sites at their worst point. I think we’ve seen so many articles about how social media is bad that reference mainstream sites like Facebook and Instag…
X is honestly among the worst of the worst. People give purposefully bad takes just for the engagement and it's overall super toxic Reddit is awful too, completely accurate things can get downvoted to oblivion because of the hive mind YouTube is still overall decent but mostly brainrot I habitually watch/listen to in the background to such a high degree it's hard to even imagine completely cutting it out of my life
But it's good, it made me quit the motherfucker.
Still hanging on to HN, its weaker doppelganger, though :)
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> Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound. For most of time, until the industrial revolution, technology didn't really advance that quickly. The world you were born into would be technologically near identical to th…
>Future shock Looked up this phrase and found the book of the same name, not sure if you were making a reference to the book but from the short synopsis I saw it seems like a very prophetic book for being written 50 years ago and I can see how many of his predictions are coming true, I will order a copy for sure now. Your post and this book describe a phenomenon that I have always felt but never seen described before…
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"Asking for a friend" is a great example.
That’s…not weird, that’s just a turn of phrase that’s in the same category as “that’s what she said”.
On a personal level I have become more anxious and it has become more difficult to deal with my tendency to procrastinate the more screen time I have and the more I am exposed to social media. I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube. A few weeks ago I blocked them too. I would say in totality I read…