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> How does reading maintain its hold on our imagination, or is that question even worth asking anymore? Clearly Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings do. Think ho

> How does reading maintain its hold on our imagination, or is that question even worth asking anymore? Clearly Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings do. Think how old The Hobbit is! Maybe he was onto something with respect to polemics, philosophies, propagandas. Maybe kids are tired of that shit, they'd rather just be ironic. > Then television, with no malice whatsoever—just a better buy for advertisers—knocked the magazines out of business. I think Kurt Vonnegut is right here. The sad thing is, all those talented people working at Google didn't get us the quality of writing that magazines did or TV does. They gave us eHow.

lmm 8y ago
I suspect there's more great writing being produced than ever before. I've seen wonderful insight and brilliant craft on random blogs, on people's Tumblr or Medium, on fanfiction sites, on 4chan, even in newspaper comment sections. But the pile of dreck it's buried under is bigger than ever.
- kajecounterhack 8y ago
  > But the pile of dreck it's buried under is bigger than ever. Maybe that's not so bad: in the past you were either famous or not. Now I think we get these common interest communities that all read the same blogs / follow the same people on twitter and great art proliferates in those niches. Maybe it doesn't enter the total public consciousness; maybe it doesn't have to.
  - lmm 8y ago
    That's true up to a point. But I do think the average quality of "published" writing has gone down as the barriers to entry have - really how could it not? For every story that a gatekeeper would've rejected because they couldn't understand its brilliance within its niche, there must be tens or hundreds that said gatekeeper would've rejected simply for being bad.
CM30 8y ago
> Maybe he was onto something with respect to polemics, philosophies, propagandas. Maybe kids are tired of that shit, they'd rather just be ironic. I think most of this moved online to be honest. Almost any factual or opinion based content you can think of is now primarily posted on the internet rather than released in book form.

lmm 8y ago

I suspect there's more great writing being produced than ever before. I've seen wonderful insight and brilliant craft on random blogs, on people's Tumblr or Medium, on fanfiction sites, on 4chan, even in newspaper comment sections. But the pile of dreck it's buried under is bigger than ever.

kajecounterhack 8y ago
> But the pile of dreck it's buried under is bigger than ever. Maybe that's not so bad: in the past you were either famous or not. Now I think we get these common interest communities that all read the same blogs / follow the same people on twitter and great art proliferates in those niches. Maybe it doesn't enter the total public consciousness; maybe it doesn't have to.
- lmm 8y ago
  That's true up to a point. But I do think the average quality of "published" writing has gone down as the barriers to entry have - really how could it not? For every story that a gatekeeper would've rejected because they couldn't understand its brilliance within its niche, there must be tens or hundreds that said gatekeeper would've rejected simply for being bad.

CM30 8y ago

> Maybe he was onto something with respect to polemics, philosophies, propagandas. Maybe kids are tired of that shit, they'd rather just be ironic. I think most of this moved online to be honest. Almost any factual or opinion based content you can think of is now primarily posted on the internet rather than released in book form.