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My grandmother is in her late 90s, has dementia, and is in a care home. My mother sent me this update last week: > Went to see Granny yesterday, was quite che
by logifail 7y ago
My grandmother is in her late 90s, has dementia, and is in a care home. My mother sent me this update last week:
> Went to see Granny yesterday, was quite cheerful, read though the poems in "When we were very young"[0], her original copy[1], given to her in 1928, how about that. She knows them off by heart and joins in when you read them to
her
Q: When we're in our late 90s, how many of us will be able to consume 90-year-old-content that way?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Were_Very_Young https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Were_Very_Young
[1] It was first published in 1924
- jgtrosh 7y agoI'm pretty sure I'll happily recite The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.
- Nikaoto 7y agoGood guys, bad guys, and explosions as far as the eye can see.
- ohithereyou 7y agoThe real tragedy of this is that nobody will know who Mister Rogers is by that time.
- linuxftw 7y agoI've been hoping this nostalgia trend will end. It's time to move forward. Instead of teaching kids about Shakespeare, we should be teaching about Super Mario for cultural history. Why should anyone care about poems or poetry? It was the entertainment of the early-print society, it has comparably little value today.
- cyphar 7y agoModern human history is more than 50 years old. While I do appreciate that more modern examples of media might get children more interested in critical analysis, claiming that all of the "valuable" thoughts made by humans only started 50 years ago is incredibly narrow-minded. Hamlet talks about the human condition and coming to terms with your own mortality. Where in Super Mario does that come up? Before or after world 4?
- linuxftw 7y ago> Hamlet talks about the human condition and coming to terms with your own mortality. So? Who cares? I don't think I ever read Hamlet. It was just entertainment, no different than a television show today.
- cyphar 7y agoThere are definitely very good and thought-provoking television shows today. I would definitely be in favour of students watching them in class too. But that doesn't mean that books and other creative media made more than 40 years ago are useless. For one thing, books written in the past give us insight into our history (I hope we can both agree that learning about our history is a good thing). For another, some of the greatest thinkers are already dead -- the only way we can learn from them is by reading what they wrote. Our society is built on the foundations of our ancestors, and it's ridiculous to say that their thoughts have no worth. For one thing, history has a tendency to repeat itself -- so maybe learning a bit more about our history would help avoid future problems. I can't imagine anyone trying to apply this logic to any field other than literature. "What's the point of learning calculus and kinematics? Newton died 300 years ago!"
- linuxftw 7y ago> I can't imagine anyone trying to apply this logic to any field other than literature. It's about going obsolete. We don't teach people how to use an abacus anymore, or even write in cursive. I'm not saying there's not a place for history, but it's time to stop fawning over things that happened 200 years ago and focus on more modern things.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- asdff 7y agoBecause our collective western culture is still the direct product of Greek philosophy no matter how many mario kart games are released. The books in the western canon are important because they are good and went on to influence everything you consume today, even the narrative in super mario. Take some time to read a good chunk of these books and you will be wiser than most people you know on all sorts of topics.
- linuxftw 7y agoMy view is quite different. They're just stories that anyone could have told and don't contain any unobtainable wisdom. The people that told those stories simply existed before us. In many ways the stories are inferior to their modern counterparts.
- cyphar 7y ago> In many ways the stories are inferior to their modern counterparts. This feels to me like a slightly tweaked form of an "appeal to novelty". The most insightful people alive today are not automatically more insightful than everyone who has died. Just because we are alive now doesn't discount the importance of previous works (and this is ignoring that today's society is based on our ancestors' philosophy and views). Not to mention modern stories are often based on older stories, and those who write modern stories by definition were informed by older stories.
- rocqua 7y agoThe argument here is not about quality. It is about relevance. Specifically, these old works have largely determined our current culture. If you want to understand the current culture, it pays to have some knowledge of what it was based on.
- linuxftw 7y agoI know it's about relevance. I'm making the unpopular argument that these ancient works aren't really all that relevant, and definitely aren't profound. Simply because something is old and was the first to do something, doesn't make it important. We have our own culture now, we spend far too much time worrying about what the dead did with their limited free time.
- lukewrites 7y agoWe should treasure poetry and literature because it's about the experience of reading, just like video games are about the experience of playing. Describing Super Mario Bros (You jump on, over, and around things, sometimes throwing fireballs, until you rescue the princess) doesn't do the experience of playing the game justice. Describing "i carry your heart with me" (I love you so much that all I do is by and for you) doesn't do the poem justice. And here is the poem: i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)i am never without it(anywhere i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling) i fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) -ee cummings
- tannhaeuser 7y agoIgnoring the provocative/trolling part, studying digital design from a cultural-historic PoV might turn out to much harder than reading books written centuries ago because of lost sources, formats, and devices. Even HTML, with its deep roots in the digital humanities (SGML), has been brittled to death because $reasons.
- tallanvor 7y agoUnfortunately schools often fail to teach the message behind the works we view as classics. Shakespeare wrote not just to entertain, but to inform and comment on what was happening at the time. Unfortunately many teachers don't do a good job, or don't have the time, to explain the background of the works. Students often don't know or understand that his works were often directed at specific royalty or other influential people. And so when we first read his works, we don't get the insults, slights, and compliments that would have been obvious to people back then. Other classics speak about what it is to be human, and evoke imagery that most works never manage. What we consider to be the classics are only a small percentage of novels, poetry, and essays created in their time. There are works being written today that will become classics, but they have to be shown to be meaningful to future generations, just like the current classics have. There are some games telling wonderful stories, and maybe they'll come to be regarded as classics in their own right. But the Super Marios, Warcrafts, and even Assassin's Creeds are not going to be among them. They're pioneers in their own right, but they don't actually have anything to teach us about the human condition, politics of their day, or have a timelessness that help towards enlightenment.
- tnolet 7y agoIf you ever feel inclined, take some courses in any cultural or art history department at a somewhat reputable college or university. You will see professors are already tying "classics" to current cultural products. Drawimg parallels, discussing patterns and influences. We jumped from Nietzsche to Japanese manga. It's not either/ or, it's both. I was at SFSU and Amsterdam uni. YMMV.
- lukewrites 7y agoI love reading. I resisted ebooks until we had a baby at which point my reading time shrank to situations (bed w/the lights out, on the bus) where my Kindle is more convenient than a paper book. I buy/acquire ebooks that are the sort of thing I'd probably purchase, read, and then sell. For books I think (or know) I want to keep, I buy a paper copy, even if I've gotten an e-copy. I want my kids to have lots of book around, not _an extensive ebook library_. There's too much joy in happening across a new book at random on the shelf; Amazon recommendations can never recreate or supplant that.
- coffeefirst 7y agoYes. The one feature I want from Kindle is the ability to buy a digital book and "upgrade" to a print version if I want to own a physical copy.
- redisman 7y agoI much prefer real books but after having a baby it's just impossible to have two hands for reading during what now counts as reading time. Now it's mostly 0 hands where I just balance the reader on something.
- thirdsun 7y agoAnd that is why I still buy my all my music. Digitally, but lossless, DRM-free and forever mine. Another concern to me is the limited selection on streaming services, particularly when it comes to rare and old releases.