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What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

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Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#11

Post by loughnane »

ineedaj0b wrote: post #4

Harry Potter will last. I have not read it but god it is everywhere. I cannot escape it, maybe it's less referenced in Asian cultures. Videogames: I don't play much. But Mario seems likely. Minecraft and Fortnite are very big right now, but they lack memorable main characters so I doubt they survive 25+ years. Music: None of my favorites but Kanye might have 1 song remembered in 50 years. I know friends who got into…

Tough to say. I can’t remember the name right now but I was reading an essay from whitehead written about a hundred years ago and he was lamenting how popular some writer was the he considered awful. It struck me because I hadn’t heard the name before, and I’m pretty well-read.

There are oceans of forgotten works out there, we just——by definition——have forgot about them.

Yes Harry Potter has sold lots of books, but how do you compare that to black beauty? It sold maybe a 10th but in a time of smaller markets. People still know of black beauty but it isn’t a cultural force——more a peculiarity of the time.

For sure some things written this century will be around in the year 3000, it’s just impossible to say what.

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#12

Post by telotortium »

tomjen3 wrote: post #8
ineedaj0b wrote: post #4

Harry Potter will last. I have not read it but god it is everywhere. I cannot escape it, maybe it's less referenced in Asian cultures. Videogames: I don't play much. But Mario seems likely. Minecraft and Fortnite are very big right now, but they lack memorable main characters so I doubt they survive 25+ years. Music: None of my favorites but Kanye might have 1 song remembered in 50 years. I know friends who got into…

I don't think Harry Potter will stand the test of time that well. In the world of Harry Potter, there are no cell phones, no internet, no Google and no AI. For my generation that was no issue at all when we got into the books, because the Internet were fairly obscure in 1997 (as in, not something you would use on a daily basis), Google was just a postdoc project and of course kids didn't have cellphones. 7 books late…

> And then the characters have to search through books by reading them until they happen to find the piece of information they want. Thats already laughable to me.

If Google keeps on declining, that experience will become even more relevant in the future. Most of the information the kids need is in a book somewhere, but often in the restricted section or perhaps not in the library at all, which is quite analogous to the dark web or even just obscure websites that are either unindexed or downranked enough that they might as well be.

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#13

Post by Zambyte »

jl6 wrote: post #10

Something that used to be popular was the concept of the Western Canon: a core reading list of timeless works for the ages, around which our collective culture revolved. But I don’t think such a thing exists or can exist any more, in our hyper-diverse, hyper-content-stuffed world. As the amount and availability of TV, music, books, films, etc. increases, the odds of meeting somebody who’s had a similar set of cultura…

I am not the content I see. I don't watch movies or shows, I don't watch Douyin (TikTok), don't keep up with social media, I haven't read Harry Potter or watched Star Wars. I only watch a few small channels on Youtube, and I play Rocket League, and work on personal hobby projects (coding, photography, ceramics).

There are lots of people who I would consider myself to not be strangers with. You should be able to connect with people over things besides "tentpole" pop culture artifacts. You should be able to connect with people without any common cultural artifacts. People are interesting.

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#14

Post by IncreasePosts »

tomjen3 wrote: post #8
ineedaj0b wrote: post #4

Harry Potter will last. I have not read it but god it is everywhere. I cannot escape it, maybe it's less referenced in Asian cultures. Videogames: I don't play much. But Mario seems likely. Minecraft and Fortnite are very big right now, but they lack memorable main characters so I doubt they survive 25+ years. Music: None of my favorites but Kanye might have 1 song remembered in 50 years. I know friends who got into…

I don't think Harry Potter will stand the test of time that well. In the world of Harry Potter, there are no cell phones, no internet, no Google and no AI. For my generation that was no issue at all when we got into the books, because the Internet were fairly obscure in 1997 (as in, not something you would use on a daily basis), Google was just a postdoc project and of course kids didn't have cellphones. 7 books late…

Why did Shakespeare remain popular in the age of the atom bomb? Wasn't every new reader in the 1960s just thinking "Hey, why doesn't Macbeth just nuke Macduff?"

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#15

Post by jowea »

ineedaj0b wrote: post #4

Harry Potter will last. I have not read it but god it is everywhere. I cannot escape it, maybe it's less referenced in Asian cultures. Videogames: I don't play much. But Mario seems likely. Minecraft and Fortnite are very big right now, but they lack memorable main characters so I doubt they survive 25+ years. Music: None of my favorites but Kanye might have 1 song remembered in 50 years. I know friends who got into…

I think the multimedia empire franchise explanation is more likely to explain which of those survive than pure popularity. Minecraft seems like it could be replaced by something else in the same genre, but MS is still actively developing it so maybe it will just evolve. But it seems likely to me new generations will want something for that niche. Something like Harry Potter seems more like the sort of thing that will last while the people who enjoy it live, but at the same time things like James Bond or Star Trek are outlasting their original fans so who knows.

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#16

Post by darby_nine »

jl6 wrote: post #10

Something that used to be popular was the concept of the Western Canon: a core reading list of timeless works for the ages, around which our collective culture revolved. But I don’t think such a thing exists or can exist any more, in our hyper-diverse, hyper-content-stuffed world. As the amount and availability of TV, music, books, films, etc. increases, the odds of meeting somebody who’s had a similar set of cultura…

> Tentpole stuff like Harry Potter is the only thing saving us from complete societal atomization where everybody is a stranger.

This can even increase alienation if you don't resonate with the source material.

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#17

Post by darby_nine »

Zambyte wrote: post #13
jl6 wrote: post #10

Something that used to be popular was the concept of the Western Canon: a core reading list of timeless works for the ages, around which our collective culture revolved. But I don’t think such a thing exists or can exist any more, in our hyper-diverse, hyper-content-stuffed world. As the amount and availability of TV, music, books, films, etc. increases, the odds of meeting somebody who’s had a similar set of cultura…

I am not the content I see. I don't watch movies or shows, I don't watch Douyin (TikTok), don't keep up with social media, I haven't read Harry Potter or watched Star Wars. I only watch a few small channels on Youtube, and I play Rocket League, and work on personal hobby projects (coding, photography, ceramics). There are lots of people who I would consider myself to not be strangers with. You should be able to conne…

> You should be able to connect with people over things besides "tentpole" pop culture artifacts.

You can, of course. You're missing or ignoring the implication that one can have any kind of expectation about connecting with an arbitrary individual.

Personally, I think this is for the positive: acknowledging that you can't expect to connect with everyone seems healthy.

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#18

Post by ksp-atlas »

hyperman1 wrote: post #9

As a kid, I found translations of Enid Blyton's books, e.g. The famous five, in my mothers book case. They must have been huge in their time. For my generation (1980), these books are basically unknown. I found a bunch of lookalikes from other authors too. I thought these would become extinct by now, but googling around for writing this post, I just find the BBC created a series about them recently. They're back!

Here in the UK, they're quite well known, maybe they just aren't in other places?

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#19

Post by niccl »

ggm wrote: post #2

Here's a popular culture take on the same theme. Jokes and sketch comedy. "The three Yorkshiremen" monty python sketch. It's actually a sketch that some of the pythons did for another comedy sketch show some years before. As far as I know it's the only one they carried forward. My parents could recite a 1940s radio comedy sketch about the phonetic alphabet and cockney rhyming slang which would probably make no sense…

> My parents could recite a 1940s radio comedy sketch about the phonetic alphabet and cockney rhyming slang

Was that the "'Ay for 'Orses" thing? I still know most of it, and never knew where it came from

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#20

Post by tomjen3 »

telotortium wrote: post #12
tomjen3 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Harry Potter will stand the test of time that well. In the world of Harry Potter, there are no cell phones, no internet, no Google and no AI. For my generation that was no issue at all when we got into the books, because the Internet were fairly obscure in 1997 (as in, not something you would use on a daily basis), Google was just a postdoc project and of course kids didn't have cellphones. 7 books late…

> And then the characters have to search through books by reading them until they happen to find the piece of information they want. Thats already laughable to me. If Google keeps on declining, that experience will become even more relevant in the future. Most of the information the kids need is in a book somewhere, but often in the restricted section or perhaps not in the library at all, which is quite analogous to…

Kids will use perplexity instead if Google does not surface enough good results.
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