Have you realised that the information age, with the huge amount of reading material...

Have you realised that the information age, with the huge amount of reading material, everything in English or translated to English, and vastly increased number of (sub-)media for books alone (physical, magazine, tablet, phone, e-reader, website, blog etc.), has destroyed the idea of being "well read"?

I think this for two reasons. First is the huge volume of stuff. You could read all day and never even read 1 % of all that "valuable" stuff. When it was 1600 and you could have read everything during your 3 years of formal education (more than 99 % of people) you could immediately join the intellectuals club. Now that's not true and it's demoralising.

The second reason is the killer. The idea of some sort of central planning bureau setting the list of required books is seen as farcical. We truly live in a much more multipolar world. Back in 1100 the Church told you to read the Greeks and the Bible and you are suddenly intelligent and well informed. There were no universities or companies or groups to tell you otherwise. These days, the huge increase in education means that everyone has an opinion and the arbitrariness of the "canon" has been exposed even to the most soody of pseudo intellectuals. Not only due to the multipolarisation within literature, but also the multipolarisation among activities. Who would claim that some Fields Medallist winning mathematician is an idiot because he hasn't read the Bible? It would take a high level of soodiness. But it would have been easy 1000 years ago.

Ultimately all this "well read" stuff was just a way for groups of people to signal social status / intellectualism or deriving other benefits by grouping their claimed interests together. We see it today when the academia-media-publishing industrial complex tells you that you have to read books or you're stupid. But this has been taken to a farcical new level now that writers like Tao Lin / Mira Gonzalez exist. It's also clear in other activities.

Democratization of opinion and industrialization were both mistakes. We all knew this. What took you so long?

Disgusting idiot

...

Repugnant philistine

So what do you suggest?

I don't think the amount of 'valuable stuff' has increased significantly. There is just a huge increase of trash, fueled by social media and blogging.

Yep. Bring back the warrior caste, I wanna venerate them lol

>has destroyed the idea of being "well read"?
There are well read people in our society, most people aren't. What you're hoping for is a man that knows everything in every field, but that was already unattainable centuries ago.

>I think this for two reasons. First is the huge volume of stuff. You could read all day and never even read 1 % of all that "valuable" stuff. When it was 1600 and you could have read everything during your 3 years of formal education (more than 99 % of people) you could immediately join the intellectuals club. Now that's not true and it's demoralising.

Literally not true, and even if it was just reading it would have been considered fucking worthless in 1600. Do you even realize to what extent those people were studying and memorizing Aristotle?

>The idea of some sort of central planning bureau setting the list of required books is seen as farcical.
Absolutely false, most academical syllabus picks their required readings from the same bucket of books. To this day to have any sort of credibility in your field you are required to have read and studied certain works extensively.

>Back in 1100 the Church told you to read the Greeks and the Bible and you are suddenly intelligent and well informed.
That's society's opinion, not a statement on wether they were really intelligent and well informed. Were those people well read and informed for the standards of even our undergrads? Would you really want to regret to that state? And in which fields?

>These days, the huge increase in education means that everyone has an opinion and the arbitrariness of the "canon" has been exposed even to the most soody of pseudo intellectuals.
Do you really think that it is hard to argue on why Dante's Divina Commedia is better than Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban? Only someone who knows absolutely nothing about the craft would see no problem about it. Aesthetic relativism is way less common than you might think, and it works in a different way than you might think.
Think about it in this way: there is no more a rank between the platonic ideas behind the pieces of art themselves, which is to say, saying that, for example, portraits are inherently inferior to landscapes. This does not mean that one can say nothing about the specific landscapes and portraits.
To put in a clear context: saying that abstract paintings are inherently inferior is not an accepted statement in the academia, but to say that there are bad abstract paintings, or to say that the medium limits the possibility of creation of good art: that is perfectly accepted. It's a less arbitrary system, but still strict enough to be meaningful.

>We see it today when the academia-media-publishing industrial complex tells you that you have to read books or you're stupid.
Aren't they right? Talking to uneducated people will show you how much is rare for someone to have at least on opinion on ethics. Books make sure that you'll get to at least that point.

I believe it was Solzhenitsyn who said (paraphrasing) "I left a country where you could not speak, to come to a country where you can say anything, but it does not matter". Looking for source

I tell my daughter that there are two types of people. Those who read and those who dont, and you will immediately know who is who. Furthermore, OPs argument about the canon is irrelevant if you are reading well cited non-fiction.

>Reading comprehension

>First is the huge volume of stuff. You could read all day and never even read 1 % of all that "valuable" stuff.
I beg to differ. 99.999999% of all books are not even worth the paper they are written on. "Valuable" stuff is really, really rare, therefore, you can still read a good amount of it.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but your look at history is somewhat warped. Back in the middle ages one that was well read was the one that could read. But as soon as he could do that, he was at least duolinguist, often more. For one, you needed to learn Latin, a necessity. That's one extra language. Europe was more fractured that it is now. You had city states and countries next to you with different languages and dialects, and you needed to know them if you wanted to converse with anyone.
Another thing, nobody bothered too much with how much a person has read, ever. A fair prerequisite was required, but authors often overcame much with some amount of bluffing, sidestepping topics, and by writing about what they knew. Dante obviously read little Greek. Everything in translation, no plays, not even Homer. Same for Shakespeare, nearly all of his historic material came from one work alone, Holinshed's Chronicles. Books were expensive. Very expensive, so nobody could read what he wanted.
Why do people multiquote? It's seriously unreadable.

>(OP)
>I'm not saying you're wrong, but your look at history is somewhat warped. Back in the middle ages one that was well read was the one that could read. But as soon as he could do that, he was at least duolinguist, often more. For one, you needed to learn Latin, a necessity. That's one extra language. Europe was more fractured that it is now. You had city states and countries next to you with different languages and dialects, and you needed to know them if you wanted to converse with anyone.
>Another thing, nobody bothered too much with how much a person has read, ever. A fair prerequisite was required, but authors often overcame much with some amount of bluffing, sidestepping topics, and by writing about what they knew. Dante obviously read little Greek. Everything in translation, no plays, not even Homer. Same for Shakespeare, nearly all of his historic material came from one work alone, Holinshed's Chronicles. Books were expensive. Very expensive, so nobody could read what he wanted.
>
>Why do people multiquote? It's seriously unreadable.
To respond to specific points in the post.

>unreadable
Not really.

It really is. It just shows ones linguistic incompetence of writing coherent sentences.

Not him, but I think you're asking a bit too much.
Sure, academics have the time to polish a perfect, cogent response without the need of intense quoting, but that could take even hours, and would become exponentially longer.
Multiquoting is a efficient tool present here on Veeky Forums, which does not really corrupt the conversation: it's not dishonest, in this case it did not lead to strawmanning and the formatting is organized well enough to be easily readable.

tl;dr: stop being so pedantic, there's nothing wrong with multiquoting

>the Church told you to read the Greeks
I really don't know about this user

>he thinks that the condition he is describing is novel
>implying it hasnt been this way since scribes starting copying greek scrolls
>implying canonicity isnt valuable for this reason
>>implying this post is anything but his self-defensive justification of being a worthless, stinking plebe

>it's not dishonest

But it is. That's the biggest problem of it and it's one of the reason that I never reply to people using it. Even what this guy here did is just that. He is taking quotes out of context and arguing them one by one. That's truly an unusable style of argument. He's not discussing a point op was trying to make, but arguing examples he was using. One could do the same with regular response, but it would at least look logical. Multiquotes aren't. When you read one without knowing the original post, you are completely lost. No points whatsoever.

being well read was never about quantity or backlog of knowledge . it was to do with your powers of recall and still is.

If he's taking out of context you can point it out. What that guy wrote is pretty coherent, and never indulges in rethoric and semantic.

Do you care to point out the flaws of that multiquote?

And? If your idea of being well read is relative to how much other people have read it's not an absolute measure of being informed but is totally relative. Do you just value certain people being more read than others, or do you think there is inherent worth in reading a certain measurable amount?

This is assuming your view that in the current generation nobody is well read in relation to others, which I disagree with.

there are still only about 150 novels that are universally considered essential classics and about 50 pieces of nonfiction. if you read those 200 things, most people will consider you well read.

Well-read - a person who read a lot
Well-read on a certain subject - a person who read a lot of literature focused on a certain subject

There, I resolved it for you, nigger.

List?

>Back in 1100
>There were no universities
...

>>Do you really think that it is hard to argue on why Dante's Divina Commedia is better than Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban?
Alright, let's hear why one shitty self-insert fanfic with stupidly obvious references to the era it was written in is better than another.

>this guy thinks he's deep

Let me guess, water is actually just particles and books are just treated wood with some ink on it, right?
No one worth their salt would give any sort of attention to your opinion.

>Let me guess, water is actually just particles and books are just treated wood with some ink on it, right?
Literally yes.

And I agree, why would anyone give any sort of attention to my opinion when there's billions of other opinions they could give attention to instead? Yet you're still doing it.

just google a few and compare. I think the goodreads ones where users vote are pretty accurate, and also the author pages to figure out which books are actually essential for each author (ex. if one has novel has 25k more votes but a lower rating, it's probably still more essential). use common sense too - your favorite Dostoyevsky might be "The Idiot," but really, to be well read, it's more important you read Crime & Punishment and MAYBE Brothers K

That's missing the whole fucking point. The Warrior caste is pure ideology. It was useful in times of more limited resources, but now that new technology has highlighted that being "well-read" (having read the traditional canon) is not only artificial but ultimately limiting in forming understanding, it is willfully ignorant to try to go back. If the old ideology were viable, it would have withstood the emergence of multiple sources of meaning, but it didn't.

You're fundamentally mistaken. You're measuring the quality of being "well read" solely on the quantity of what you've read in relation to the written circulating material. It's axiomatic that nobody can be well read in this sense, but you vocalize this retarded observation like it means something anyway. You realize this error yourself and scramble to do away with a prescribed canon, which you describe as "arbitrary" in order to redeem your argument. The academic tradition persists irrespective of your evaluation (which is apparently shared even by pseudo intellectuals) of it as arbitrary.