Why has literature become so unpopular with this generation? Is it because of video games?

only because poor "people" were too retarded to read

>another thinly-veiled attempt to self-congratulate for reading books

fuck off with your pseud circlejerk you fucking newfags

I think it's mostly schools. Until I had no other form of entertainment available but books I never would read because everything else I had read was forced by schools and turned it into a memorizing and question answering task that stripped any fun from it. When that's the only thing a kid feels when reading they'll never willingly pick up a book while there's a perfectly good spoon to shove up their ass for entertainment instead.

It cant compete with video/internet as far as entertainment, and nobody thinks seeking out meaning or humanity through literature is worthwhile, necessary or even possible.

It hasn't, pseud.

Well it isn't unpopular amongst intellectuals. Back in the day it was one of the only mediums for entertainment, but now we have plenty of mediums for that. So of course lots of people who have no business reading anyway, do not read.

It depends on what metrics you're using for popular, OP. When I was in high school (about 4 years ago or so), the "cool indie" kids were reading Veeky Forums. Granted, it was basic shit like Hemingway and Vonnegut (whatever wasn't already on the class reading list), but that was what the "cool kids" did. Looking back at it now, obviously we weren't really all that cool, but plenty of the other kids thought we were and wanted in on the Veeky Forums club. I mean it was mainly for cultural capital and we all took being called pretentious as an accolade, but it was fun at the time and we sure felt cool.

I guess that's kind of half of what Veeky Forums is to this day though honestly.

Anyone who stops at "education" in explaining the ills of the world hasnt thought enough about anything. Also theres no obligation from adulthood in general to educate you. You must do that. And its not going to be fun, its going to be hard work.

Im immensely proud of the reading habits ive struggled mightily to form over the years, the books ive read have changed the entire course of my life. i was a complete jackass who couldnt think before i started. Its hard work thats slow to pay dividends. All readers are proud of their reading. Saying you arent is fraudulent humility.

>'cool kids' reading in high school
>21st century
lmao

>Saying you arent is fraudulent humility.

hahahahahahahaha

not following suit in this gaudy display of humblebrag self-congratulations is "fraudulent humility" now?

fuck.
off.
pseud.

My mom forced me to read a book when i was like 14 and i started cry infront of her because the story was so sad to me
I dont remember the title and i dont want to read it again

Private schooling in a major US city, user. Things were a bit different than Mid West public school systems.

I dont understand. Are you saying reading isnt work one should be proud of or that one ought never be proud of their work generally?

Jesus Christ this is so true and depressing, I just wish I could cultivate that habit even more but it does seem like an uphill battle at times, but reflecting on how i barely read at all before I started forcing myself versus now does motivate me to try harder. It really is one of the most satisfying things when you genuinely take interest in a book and just get something out of it.

poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/alfred-tennyson

> The queen treated Tennyson with what was great informality by her reserved standards, so that the relationship between monarch and laureate was probably more intimate than it has ever been before or since

>His extraordinary popularity was obvious in other ways as well. He was given honorary doctorates by Oxford and Edinburgh universities; Cambridge three times invited him to accept an honorary degree, but he modestly declined. The greatest men in the country competed for the honor of meeting and entertaining him.

More competition dummy. Movies still follow a written script though.

Its deeper than that. It has to do with the prevalence of atheism, the expansion of sentimentality and self help culture, the abandonment of humanist ideas of learning and the acceptance of historical identity as primary (hence why young people instinctively read novels for social crit instead of psychology).

Theres an idealist dimension to the material expansion of electricity, is what im saying.

I imagine that the rise of social media and smartphones have a large influence. It's easier to browse your Facebook feed for 10 seconds and get instant gratifications instead of putting in the work it requires to sit down and read literature.

Also, a repetitive use of smartphones and iPads from an early age makes your attention span extremely short and gives you a constant urge for dopamine

>it depends on the metrics
Stopped reading there. People do not read any more, and if they do it is YA. This is a frightening fact that cannot be disputed. The contemporary forms of entertainment are poison for the mind, they obliterate the ability to concentrate and cultivate mental discipline - the reprecussions will be horrifying, I cannot imagine what our future will look like once the 20 year old manchildren of today turn 40 and become the backbone of the society. We are in for a wild ride, that's for sure.

There is one more point I would like to make. The ancient theatre had the same role as e.g. football has today - mass entertainment. Who do you think Balzac and Stendhal wrote for? The marginalization of literature and consequently the attitude that it belongs to the "high culture" which is reserved for a tiny fraction of the society is a new phenomenon. I cannot even imagine the consequences of the massive cultural downfall, we shall find out in about 20 years. In case you are a university student, all you have to do is talk to your peers in order to confirm what I have written - idiocracy awaits.

>Are you saying reading isnt work one should be proud of or that one ought never be proud of their work generally?

don't try to pass this off as merely "feeling proud" -- it isn't. if it was you'd simply feel proud and leave it at that.

but you feel compelled to take it that one step further and gloat about it with other le literary life try hards in circlejerk sessions because you're a fucking idiot newfag.

It kills me to think of how hard death and aging is going to be for millenials, they have no spiritual preparation for it whatsoever.

You're an idiot.

because all the literture worth a shit gets made into movies or tv shows.

also youtube video essays adn TEDTalks vs actually reading essays

Y do u say that

I would argue atheism, holy books aside, is only more reason to read, not less. The search for meaning is a basic human instinct and Atheists are rudderless for better or for worse, seems to me they would naturally be drawn to books.

>the abandonment of humanist ideas

This I would agree with you much more on, I will always remember this one dinner I had with people. This one kid was asked what he was going to do in school, and this was during the whole STEM fever, and he said he wanted to learn philosophy, and he found it really interested. As soon as he was out of sight, people laughed, laughed, and just mocked him, literally just imitating him and pretending to be pretentious philosophers and cracking barista jokes.

I totally believe society has lost all respect for humanism but I believe there is going to be a rebound. I believe society has left itself without any outlet in regards to learning from the past, or exploring meaning, or even more practical things like how to write effectively.

I don't believe this is sustainable, people crave that shit, when they got rid of religion in the USSR it came right back after it started being allowed and came back strong. There is a certain part of people being suppressed by modern society that is being poorly satiated with dramas on Netflix. I think there is plenty further for humanism to fall though, it's been taken over by the radical left, anthropology for example is literally one of the top most left leaning fields out there and is very related to humanism and is entirely up its own leftist buttcrack.

I'm bias here by my own personal experience, but I've seen how my friends just clinging to any sort of authority that gives them any semblance of guidance, and I know there is something lacking.

>expansion of sentimentality and self help culture

I don't have any frame of reference to how big sentimentality was before, but I would argue the self-help market is already past its prime, it probably peaked in the 80s/90s. People realise the shallowness of "The Secret" by and large. Society is becoming too increasingly unequal and hard to thrive in for the sugar-coated easy to digest step-by-step messages of self-help books to be taken seriously.

> idiocracy awaits.

IQ is trending up, and historically speaking, it's trending up rather sharply these days. When automation kills all the jobs for people under 90IQ you'll see how much of an asset being dumb is. Not much of one. Everything a dumb person can do a smart person can do better.

>I cannot imagine what our future will look like once the 20 year old manchildren of today turn 40
not much more different than today. a lot of 40 year olds are fucking retarded and were raised on television

Atheism leads to despair which leads to the need for distraction and sentimental explantions of life.

>hanging out at the mall
What's the deal with this american meme?

Malls are actually in decline nowadays, having been squeezed by Facebook, Amazon and fast casual trendy eateries.

>IQ is trending up
I doubt, but even if it is IQ is not the only relevant criterion. The issue I am addressing is related to culture and what you and the other user are refering to as the humanist ideals. I studied electrical engineering and it is certain that quite a few in my class were more intelligent than me in terms of the ability to quickly grasp a concept and solve tasks. Once again, this is not what I am aiming at - from my point of view, the "STEM skills" have close to zero relevance when it comes to the humanist ideals, when it comes to culture. I am talking about a different kind of virtue that was first rationally explicated by Aristotle and his notion of phronesis: the cultivation of virtue and the consequent ability to intuitively tell right from wrong, to acquire knowledge without a method of (or inspired by) the natural sciences. The humanist tradition had been unbroken for a long time (the stoics, Gratian, Vico, Shaftesbury, Oetinger, Hume...) until Kant who is largely responsible for the death of the humanist tradition - he emptied the notion of sensus communis (which does not differ significantly from phronesis) by reducing it to an a priori of formalist aesthetics. That is how the humanist notions lost their powerful moral and political connotation, they were stripped away from their primary function as means of acquiring knowledge regardless of a method. And how does one acquire phronesis/sensus communis/good taste? By education, education as first understood and explicted by Hegel (Bildung) - a process of spiritual uplifting by living and learning. I have basically repeated Gadamer's argument from his magnum opus - Truth and Method. Knowledge cannot be reduced exclusively to the method of the positive sciences - doing so inevitably leads to social decay (which we are experiencing today). The humanist ideals are needed more than ever in the contemporary society, we desperately need a new enlightenment - the education of the masses based upon the forgotten humanist tradition.

You watch video essays and TEDTalks because they're in the same place you go to have fun. You are only a few clicks away from a mildly insightful youtube channel, whereas you have to go to the bookstore, search for the right book and spend money on it. Literature and philosophy need to get up to date and somehow create or incorporate themselves into a network that allows easy access to them.

I'm actually reading through the Greeks right now ending with the philosophers so I don't know quite what the fuck you're talking about to a great degree but I will be sure to react in a month or so after this thread dies and will subsequently call you a pseud faggot or self-flagellate myself for saying something dumb.

I will agree however with

>The humanist ideals are needed more than ever in the contemporary society, we desperately need a new enlightenment - the education of the masses based upon the forgotten humanist tradition.

I swallowed the STEM meme hard and have faith in the ideas you talk about, I'm working to learn more so I can carry out those ideals. I've just seen how my peers, my family, everybody I know connects to these things that provide the same things as humanism, and it just has grasped my curiosity because the same people also tend to disdain humanism and mock it openly.

Name one age, year or whatever where literature was more readily available and more people were literate.

Protip: you can't

People's brains are wired differently because of constant interactions with technology

Is it possible to revert that change

Do you mean to people it's already happened to or to society in the future? Either way read 'The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains' by Nicholas Carr. I find that if I don't read for a while my brain goes into 'internet-mode' and I find it hard to sit and focus, but then reading for a while can flip it back again.

clearly is hasn't become too unpopular. i think it's safe to assume everyone on this board is under 30, which puts them in the Millennial pile

2018

A think that a lot of the factors presented above are responsible.

But it all comes down to attention spans and imagination. We are getting dumber and dumber and that's a fact. Kids nowadays don't use their brains as much as we used to.

Its the end of the guttenberg mind.

millenials have destroyed their cognitive faculties with smart phones and pictures of "funny" frogs.

you did it to yourselves.

literature is dead/dying. the codex will die in your lifetime

im 34

This is one of the slowest boards here.

I have a similar story, but I hated reading because everything my father recommended wasn't something I could enjoy as a kid.

...

False premise, literature has never been popular.

The masses have only been able to read for a century or so.

not all books are literature

lack of proper lit curricula in elementary schools.
as the current powers that be are cynically ignorant, blatantly anti-intellectual and very open about their hate for the arts and love for private capital, you can expect it to grow a lot worse, so enjoy!!

But all literature is written, so if you can't read anything you can't read literature either.

So even when only a small percentage of people could read, just an even smaller percentage of those people would actively read literature.

You could probably say that literature is more popular than ever.

It has never been popular. And I think more people read now than 20 or 30 years ago.

What did plebs do with their free time before mass media existed?

get an infection and die

>tfw my cold is still present after six days
Truly the worst timeline

Lack of attention span. Kids these days can't go for 30 seconds without checking their phone.

This. My parents put in an enormous effort to get me to read. I learned at age 4 (not my genius, but their hard work) and read every day. My love for reading only came to an end when A. it became mandatory in school B. teenage hormones kicked in. I was into sports and had a large circle of friends so reading just lost its place in my life for a decade. I'm so glad I started reading again regularly around 3 years ago.
I'm not American and I hung out in a mall, outside a mall, at the park after buying drink from the mall etc. etc. It's a public place where you run into people you know.

The fact that you felt compelled to post a picture of an attractive woman in the OP, says a lot.

I can't help it, I'm addicted to porn

End of the day, it's for the best that the majority of society is being steered away from reading. Universal literacy was a mistake. And I'm not talking about reading and writing, those are just job skills, but rather the will to read for pleasure.

These people will be enraptured by television, video games, whatever, or possibly just very bad books. It will ultimately spare us their opinions and ensure they have no influence over literary tradition. Go read the reviews for any of the 'required' works in high school, it's full of cretinous illiterates dropping one stars on fundamental works of English literature like Chaucer and Shakespeare's plays. These are the people who do not read as adults and our world is better off for it.

Well, for once an e-reader/Calibre setup does wonders for accessibility. I've read 41 books so far this year and bought none. Of course, it's not legal, but i'm grateful it exists. I would hve bought physical books exclusively, but the nearest decent bookstore is 3 hours away from where i live.
I think literature can only get to a point of accessibility before simplifying it too much (like say, making it into videos) or basically giving them away for free (like my example)

schools are the way they are because of shitty parents. You have no idea what you're talking about

I hope an EMP goes off

>library 2 blocks away
>2 used book stores literally within 1 block
>regular book store 3 blocks away
Living in a city has its advantages. Of course I still get most of my stuff from Amazon. Though these days libraries are pretty sweet, I can go online and browse the books of like 50 libraries in one database and order whatever I want to be delivered for free to my nearest library. It's like having a library the size of a football stadium right next door.

Work so they don't fucking die.

It's because of these Jezebels OP

This is a simplification of course but mass media was only created after industrialization gave more and more people free time. There was no time where plebs had free time but no mass media.

You've got it backwards.

Hunter-gatherers 'worked' about four hours a day and medieval peasants had more than 150 free days per year.

Working hard all day didn't exist until industrialisation came about.

A reason is that literature is less immediately appealing due to its primitive technology. Why does lit love books but never talk about the oral tradition? Technology. Of course lit is too pseudo Intellectual to ever admit this. According to lit, novels, and the commercial model that allowed them to be distributed in the way they popularly are now, have been around for millions of years.

"Why do you guys automatic shit on serialised novels now when Dostoevsky and Dickens wrote them?" "Well, um... Shut up pleb!" Don't expect lit to be self reflective.

That's only a hump, not the main reason. The main reason is that literature is presented as some thing "enriching" and educational rather than entertaining, as the medium was first intended to be. You get teachers telling you to enjoy certain books or else you're stupid. You get post hoc theorising about Shakespeare's use of literary techniques which are obviously bullshit as they never give any greater predictive power or practical power (ability to write great books). A 13 year old doesn't think in these words but they intuitively know it and they know it's bullshit. You learn how to read "apple" and what it corresponds to and you then can use that anywhere. You learn what 1+1 is and you can apply that anywhere. Now look at what the fuck they're teaching you to do in English classes, from school to university level. It's utterly pretentious and vacuous post hoc theorising or plain bullshitting. lit is fully entrenched with the idea that reading books makes them smart, so you'll never see that again on here.

Because these days it's easy to coast by a pretend you're cultured/experienced. Everything in a quick easy summary is a click away. Attention spans have lessened and unless one is bombarded by constant things to do, rather than sit and ruminate, they'll lose interest.

You know, I think I know why. It is because of ghetto culture. And not to mention americuck rednecks,

I hope this is ironic.

Spoiler alert: Humanity has always been declining since society was invented. t. Rousseau

The picture you posted is one of the reasons.

Literature more popular than ever, and most idiots who took this thread seriously are dumbasses.

Almost no one I know my age reads for pleasure. And most of the people who do are women.

It's because women entered the workforce and stopped actually raising their kids themselves. Before that they'd spend all day at home and there was plenty of time to read with their children. Now they come home after an 8 hour day, "too exhausted" to actually spend time with their kid, so they hand him a big mac and let him space out in front of the tv for 4 hours.
Basically, women ruin everything

Porn in general?

Your post made me realize how lucky I was to have a parents that encouraged me to read as a child, what an impact it has made! Thanks for brightening my day a little

Reading sucks. I jerk off to face sitting videos instead.

Grandma, isn't this your nap time?

Thank god I no longer have to read Dostoyevsky to get my rocks off.

cell phones and social media have hurt literature much more than videogames.
people have never read so much, they just arent reading books.

Because it is relatively high effort entertainment in a world of low effort entertainment.

That's still more than in the past, people in this era have more access to books than ever nefore.

People still read more than in the past, in this era having access to books is easier than ever before.

wew

At least you're honest with yourself. Seek Christ.

There's nothing inherently wrong with video games.

damn son, check your denial, you're awfully defensive for some reason.

>there's nothing wrong with video games
>why are you so defensive
lit at its best.

and you happen to be the enlightened exception, interesting how that happens

>citation needed