3 ms·
I'm a bit of an old timer so I'll throw something out there. Entertainment used to be rare. Albums used to cost $20 back when that used to be a lot of money.
by narrator 1y ago
I'm a bit of an old timer so I'll throw something out there. Entertainment used to be rare. Albums used to cost $20 back when that used to be a lot of money. TV was 13 channels, and that was if you had cable. People had to read because there was no other option. Now there's absolutely unlimited free/cheap entertainment and literary fiction is highly politicized because of critics. There's no such thing as a controversial novel that gets any mention by anyone post 2008.
The last contemporary literary novel I read was Michel Houellebecq's "Submission" and I read it only because it was controversial, extremely well written and Hourllebecq writes novels that appeal to middle aged men. I'm always up for a novel like that, but it seems impossible to find these days.
- tgv 1y agoPlus what 'social media' has done to our attention span. It takes some to read a book, especially literature.
- kreyenborgi 1y agoat least takes away the ability to comprehend substack articles
- JakeHPark 1y agoClay Shirky calls it "filter failure": https://mascontext.com/issues/information/its-not-information-overload-its-filter-failure https://mascontext.com/issues/information/its-not-informatio... > The cost of producing anything by anyone has fallen through the floor, famously, and as a result, there is no economic logic that says you have to filter for quality before you publish. Moreover: > What we are dealing with now isn’t information overload, because we are always dealing with information overload, the problem is filter failure. I think this is a compelling take. It's gotten to the point where I have to use ChatGPT to look for good sources instead of Googling directly. I held out for a while, but had to capitulate in late 2024 when search engines just became a total slopfest. As a sidenote, I did enjoy Houellebecq's Le sens du combat. :P