I was a little worried about something

I was a little worried about something.

When we think on Greece and Rome, for example, or Elizabethan England, most of the echoes that are on everybody’s minds is their great books and works of art. Most other things faded and dissolved, and only the really worthy survived. This is a good feeling, to realize that, of several egos and vanities, only the real great ones are “alive” today – all the mediocrities are now only emptiness.

But in our modern day world, with thousands of books and pamphlets, thousands of TV shows, thousands of movies, thousands of Youtubers, thousands of games, thousands of recordings of every single small detail of every single mediocre life: what guarantees do we have that only the truly worthy in our generation and generations to come will survive?

I mean: let’s imagine someone writing as great literature as Shakespeare or Tolstoy on our modern world. Let’s imagine something like War and Peace being published on this very day. Isn’t all the trash (thousands of bad movies, books, cartoons, tv shows, youtubers, facebookers, etc, etc, etc) going to steal space that is due to this masterpiece? Isn’t all this freedom of everybody recording every single minute of their existence and the possibility of every single piece of crap “expressing” themselves going to prevent the greatest works of art to really survive? If someone was writing poetic plays in the level of Shakespeare today, who can guarantee his/her works would find space to breath among the jungle of junk that is produced daily?

How the new generations will select what is worth among the giant piles of cultural trash?

>How the new generations will select what is worth among the giant piles of cultural trash?
Professors will tell us.

>youtubers, facebookers

this are the worst

Is that Hadrian?

>professors
more like foundations offering research monies and department perks

Yes

bump

They won't, because by and large they won't know how to tell the worthy from the chaff. They will be told by experts, of course, but those experts will have a daunting task ahead of them.
The volume of cultural content we produce and store every day increases steadily. The audiences fracture more and more into tiny niches. Thus the time and effort required to even detect any worthy contributions makes it impossible to find all of them. Our contribution to the future is, in essence, up to chance and marketign.

this makes me sad :(

The modern age also makes sure that this hypothetical piece will be saved somewhere. And since that is guaranteed, then it's bound to get noticed some day in the close or distant future.
El Greco's paintings for example weren't appreciated or realised for the masterpieces they were until 3 centuries had passed from his death.
tldr: if something is a masterpiece, it will shine through the crap given enough time.

Too absolutist. It's confirmation bias to suppose that we recognize all of history's great artists and writers. Not every masterpiece is remembered.

It's no more difficult for great works to be recognized today than it was in the past. There are more people producing tripe, but there are also more consumers. There's no reason for that ratio to have changed. I think the underlying misconception in the OP is that our times are somehow fundamentally different from the past.

Things like games and movies have little to no chance of immortality; if you want a work to survive millenia it must be in the form of literature, music, sculputre, etc.

Cultural space is becoming post-scarce. You don't need to spend a month copying a book by hand, we can afford to copy it all and keep it all.

The trash won't get in the way.

Besides, there were probably a lot of great works that got lost because some medieval cunts didn't feel like keeping it around for ideological reasons or the only copy got fucked up because of a random fire.

We're better off now.

Why do you think that great movies cant survive for thousands of years?

Not criticizing your point of view, just curious.

Technology, really. In the event of another collapse people arent going to spend much time working out how to preserve VHS and DVDs. You might get a few who know how to work the tech but as time goes on that will be forgotten like any other dead language and ancient tool. For the stories you'll at best you get adaptations into another form like plays or simple narrative.

This even more true with videogames, think of how many gems are forever trapped on an ancient system and have to be revived with buggy emulators.

We're working on the bloom A.I. which will be able to digest billions of terabytes of literature a picosecond.
It will give concise scores based on a 1-27 star system (it's own devise) which will include a +/- modifier based on personal taste. The write-ups it gives are acceptable currently; however we are ironing out some kinks still, as the bloom bot seems to get stuck giving overly turgid responses sometimes.

We predict in a few years it will be producing the most accurate filtering system for human thinking ever created, as long as we can keep it away from producing it's out bad sci Fi you should be able to submit your own work or ask it about any work and get an instant response; coming soon.

Is... is that dude holding his dick?

Truly the most efficient tyrant ever devised.

Film has a huge archiving problem right now. Celluloid film breaks down over time (there are hundreds of films from the silent era that are lost forever) and digital formats turn obsolete or break even faster. There's also not really any serious archiving happening. Of course, if people really care, they'll find ways to preserve it, but a lot of movies won't survive.

The real question is, why should you even care?

There are tons of shitty movies being made but only the great movies will be remembered.

I think the problem with people not remembering movies is that old movies will eventually stop looking as good as newer movies. You've already have this as people don't want to watch older movies, because the special effects/ picture quality just isn't as good as whatever is the newest one.
A san example, I just recently watched "Close encounters of the third kind", which was bakc then viewed as a marble in special effects technology, won numerous awards and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. It honestly looked terrible to me, and I'd have rather watched a newer movie.
Books aren't the same, there is no technological advancement in projecting letters, except for displaying them on different mediums.
Books also don't reflect technology and socio-cultural situations. All the classics books don't deal with current events, or politics, because those things pass, and become unrelevant.

bump