alt Hacker NewsIt's been my impression that classic literature is going the same way as painting and other forms of high art.
It was certainly a great display of human intellectual prowess and artistic capacity in bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
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> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
Cinema is dying from mostly self-inflicted wounds though. They keep making movies (or re-making movies) with bad writing, bad stories, and unrealistic character development arcs that not many people want to watch.
Good movies have been rewarded in theatres. Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary, etc. all had great box office sales when other movies around them flopped.
Cinema is dying? Hollywood is on track to have its best year since 2019. Where do people come up with this stuff?
Energy is more difficult to gauge, but the average American has over 5 hours of leisure time daily. When there was more of a time crunch in the past, Americans read more.
I think it's mostly due to mobile phones. Most people seem to spend a substantial amount of their free time staring at their phone screen rather than engaging with books or other forms of entertainment. Phones being bite sized entertainment orientated is probably changing the way people feel about longer forms.
> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
Ever since cinema got reduced to the next Marvel superhero movie, I stopped caring about it.
> who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Anyone who has the time and energy to spend on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or for that matter, anyone who has the time and energy to spend watching TV.
> bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Capitalism is "fixing the glitch" of workers having space energy. I hope soon we'll achieve the ideal bimodal distribution of labor: work intensified to the point where workers that have the energy for nothing but work, and the impoverished totally unemployed that we can just corral and forget about.
Many people still read novels. I live in NYC and see numerous people read books and Kindles every day on the train.
> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much
It's being replaced with an even longer form of visual media; the mini series. Stories that used to be told in an hour and a half are now being told in 8 hour-long segments