Comments by "anastasis" (@anastasis-cm5hw) on "Why everyone stopped reading." video.

@sasi5841 As someone who likes video games quite a lot, this is absolutely ridiculous, and frankly this just evinces absolutely no understanding of the classics. Whatever happened in your classroom, you didn't leave getting them, and worse still is an attitude of such entitled aesthetic ignorance! Video games and books are ENTIRELY different mediums with totally different strengths. Video games can give you sensory immersion and atmosphere, books can literally show you how a character thinks on the page. They are not the same. I'm all for diversifying the classics, but I promise you, if you find Ulysses boring you're not going to be able to stomach the greats of the Harlem Renaissance or Cortázar or Toni Morrison or Never Let Me Go or any number of other hard books by non-white authors, lol. If anything, the differences in cultural storytelling conventions will mean you have to do even MORE work. And plenty of those books are absolutely not adaptable in a video game. They also include lots of "whining." The issue isn't the classics, it's expanding our cultural/ethnic repertoire and getting people to feel comfortable with boredom and working to understand something hard.
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@hermitkingtvking3991 People used to read old books that didn't fit their cultural/time context all the time. Standard education used to involve learning in Latin and Greek. The exercise is broadening your understanding of the human experience by pushing to comprehend another person's. It requires effort. I'm all for modern books too, for the record, and certainly for non-white-European ones
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@janisir4529 I think some attention should be paid to what kids love to read, but nobody expects math to be not hard and fun 100% of the time. Reading comprehension is a legitimate skill and SHOULD be challenging.
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@ctom42 You just don’t get old literature. Sorry. Whether something bores you in an age of smartphones has almost nothing to do with quality. I love modern literature too and by no means think it’s inferior, but anyone who says this is just running with their broken aesthetic judgements born of not having spent enough time trying to understand old literature on its own terms
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@naeshelle I think the issue is that the fallaway of the classics, as said, led to a fallaway of hard or challenging or dense literature. For some reason, plenty of people love to evoke the diversity case (which I am all for!) by claiming old white dudes wrote boring, sucky literature…. Ignoring that non-white authors were just as engaged with highly dense/experimental art as well. It’s also not like the literature world is divided into white and non-white. They draw from the same well. I study the Romantic era, and in terms of the British white romantics, they were influenced by Indian epic poetry… and in turn influenced abolitionist literature and Chinese poets… and in turn influenced the Modernists, who influenced and were influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, etc.
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@idepartasair thank you. There are a bunch of unrepentant dopamine hijacked smartphone/media addicts in this audience and it shows. (I’m addicted too if I let myself be, but at least I repent 😂)
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@janisir4529 also, if you ever bothered to have an informed opinion about this, cognitive scientists have hooked up the brains of people who were reading literature plenty of times and come to interesting conclusions about what books can do, including challenging, dense, idea-rich ones
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@janisir4529 I have absolutely read books not in my first language. It's hard, but it can be a really fun experience to see how different languages formulate thoughts differently. If reading is too difficult or boring for you, I don't care and think that's fine (though I don't know why this would impact your ability to read in your native language?). My issue is with you projecting your intellectual inferiority complex onto the importance of literature. My lack of interest in math (except philosophically) doesn't mean math is any less cool or important, and your lack of interest in literature likewise means nothing but that you don't get literature.
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@janisir4529 The "creature comforts" of science are wonderful, but they now include weapons that could destroy the world, pollution, carbon emissions, etc. . I'm grateful for the good parts of tech, but the bad ones are seriously nightmarish, and on top of that, hunter-gatherers are on the whole some of the happiest people in the world. It's a complicated mess, and on the whole I hope science will someday be of net benefit for mankind, but its downsides are seriously apparent in 2024.
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@janisir4529 As for poetry being "just putting words together"--lol, you just described laws, and worldviews, and decisions people make about who gets resources, and everything that happens in society every day. Poetry is probably the most fine-tuned expression of our relationship with language, and it's valuable because what gets said is incredibly important. Mathematics professors debating about knot theory aren't creating technology that will save world hunger. They are "just putting numbers together." But obviously the field of math as a whole benefits from their research. People will engage in politics and marketing and language- and idea-based practices will be a part of society no matter what. The key is to do them well and to learn discernment so that you can think critically about them, and literature classes can help you do that; according to science itself, under the right circumstances literature can teach empathy, which isn't something STEM (as great as it can be) can do.
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@ctom42 Unfortunately, being an avid reader doesn’t mean you don’t have to work on narrow-minded philistinism. you seem very confused between “I don’t like it/the reading experience was hard” and “it’s bad.” Old literature isn’t valid because it’s old, it’s because it has, to some degree, stood the test of time—and the fact it IS harder to access is an advantage, because it gives you a window into history and the range of aesthetic possibilities books have. (This is aside from the diversity conversation because obviously some things don’t stand the test of time for oppression reasons—it is criminal that Frankenstein and Jean Toomer’s Cane went unread for so long. But those books are as likely to bore you as any other old book.) If you prefer contemporary literature, that’s great. Everyone has preferences. But that has jack to do with aesthetics. I like literature from every time period and I assure you there is plenty valuable in each period. I have a harder time reading Chaucer than Elena Ferrente but that’s nothing to do with Chaucer’s worthiness and I’m up to the challenge.
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@janisir4529 plenty of civilizations have run just fine without math, lol. Whereas by contrast, every society on earth has poetry. I see you are biased in favor of STEM— which means you’re ignorant of the ways that the skills employed in creating/interpreting literature are at work every single day in political campaigns and marketing strategies, to say nothing of the fact literature literally shows you how people make culture, connections, and meaning in their lives. It’s not “entertainment.” That’s like saying math is entertainment because you can use math to make rollercoasters. I also DON’T find math fun at all, but I appreciate it. I don’t think math’s value is based on its ability to “entertain” me. How ridiculous!
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@janisir4529 The "creature comforts" of science are wonderful, but they also include the atom bomb, fossil fuels, and weapons of chemical warfare. Not to mention smartphones and their ability to wreck havoc on our attention span lol. I'm grateful for the good parts of tech, but the bad ones are seriously nightmarish, and on top of that, hunter-gatherers are on the whole some of the happiest people in the world. It's a complicated mess, and on the whole I hope science will someday be of net benefit for mankind, but its downsides are seriously apparent in 2024. Politics and marketing are going to be out there, regardless of whether you "think they are a detriment to society" or not. The key is to use them ethically and mindfully--which literature helps you do, and moreover, literature helps you think critically about the stories being told to you. One way or another, you are going to craft stories to make meaning and understand the world (not just scientifically, but culturally and ethically). Studying literature can help you do that and moreover, there are studies that show that under the right circumstances, reading literature can promote empathy--something the study of science or math, wonderful as it can be, can't do. I was never at any point claiming that reading is the only intellectually important thing you can do, lol, and to me it's very revealing that you are so incredibly defensive about "reading being mystified" (whatever that means). Math is equally mystified as being some quasi-magical intellectual smart person activity, and I never engage in it. But that's never shaken my contentedness with my own intellect because my interest in intellectual activities is based in curiosity, not some sort of ego-attachment to looking and sounding smart. I wouldn't be caught dead doing math for fun, but that doesn't mean I'm not very capable in my own ways--and moreover I benefit from being in a world where people are different from me! I've had two serious partners who were very into math, and married one of them--and he never reads for fun. Yet we still have wonderful, lively, spirited conversations about the universe that benefit from each other's different experience. I have nothing but respect for their math interests and they had nothing but respect for my investment in literature. I would suggest going out, touching grass, and getting in touch with some curiosity yourself, because you're just completely wrong about books.
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@janisir4529 The "creature comforts" of science are wonderful, but they also include the atom bomb, fossil fuels, and the extremely powerful weapons our militaries have now. I'm grateful for the good parts of tech, but the bad ones are seriously nightmarish, and on top of that, hunter-gatherers are on the whole some of the happiest people in the world. It's a complicated mess, and on the whole I hope science will someday be of net benefit for mankind, but its downsides are seriously apparent in 2024. As for poetry being "just putting words together"--lol, you just described laws, and worldviews, and decisions people make about who gets resources, and everything that happens in society every day. Poetry is probably the most fine-tuned expression of our relationship with language, and it's valuable because what gets said is incredibly important. Mathematics professors debating about knot theory aren't creating technology that will save world hunger. They are "just putting numbers together." But obviously the field of math as a whole benefits from their research. Politics and marketing are going to be out there, regardless of whether you "think they are a detriment to society" or not. The key is to use them ethically and mindfully--which literature helps you do, and moreover, literature helps you think critically about the stories being told to you. One way or another, you are going to craft stories to make meaning and understand the world (not just scientifically, but culturally and ethically). Studying literature can help you do that and moreover, there are studies that show that under the right circumstances, reading literature can promote empathy--something the study of science or math, wonderful as it can be, can't do.
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@janisir4529 I was never at any point claiming that reading is the only intellectually important thing you can do, lol, and to me it's very revealing that you are so incredibly defensive about "reading being mystified" (whatever that means). Math is equally mystified as being some quasi-magical intellectual smart person activity, and I never engage in it. But that's never shaken my contentedness with my own intellect because my interest in intellectual activities is based in curiosity, not some sort of ego-attachment to looking and sounding smart. I wouldn't be caught dead doing math for fun, but that doesn't mean I'm not very capable in my own ways--and moreover I benefit from being in a world where people are different from me! I've had two serious partners who were very into math, and married one of them--and he never reads for fun. Yet we still have wonderful, lively, spirited conversations about the universe that benefit from each other's different experience. I have nothing but respect for their math interests and they had nothing but respect for my investment in literature. I would suggest going out, touching grass, and getting in touch with some curiosity yourself since your beliefs about books are just totally incorrect.
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@janisir4529 The "creature comforts" of science are wonderful, but they also include the atom bomb. I'm grateful for the good parts of tech, but the bad ones are seriously nightmarish, and on top of that, hunter-gatherers are on the whole some of the happiest people in the world. It's a complicated mess, and on the whole I hope science will someday be of net benefit for mankind, but its downsides are seriously apparent in 2024. As for poetry being "just putting words together"--lol, you just described laws, and worldviews, and decisions people make about who gets resources, and everything that happens in society every day. Poetry is probably the most fine-tuned expression of our relationship with language, and it's valuable because what gets said is incredibly important. Mathematics professors debating about knot theory aren't creating technology that will save world hunger. They are "just putting numbers together." But obviously the field of math as a whole benefits from their research. Politics and marketing are going to be out there, regardless of whether you "think they are a detriment to society" or not. The key is to use them ethically and mindfully--which literature helps you do, and moreover, literature helps you think critically about the stories being told to you. One way or another, you are going to craft stories to make meaning and understand the world (not just scientifically, but culturally and ethically). Studying literature can help you do that and moreover, there are studies that show that under the right circumstances, reading literature can promote empathy--something the study of science or math, wonderful as it can be, can't do.
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@janisir4529 As for poetry being "just putting words together"--lol, you just described laws, and worldviews, and decisions people make about who gets resources, and everything that happens in society every day. Poetry is probably the most fine-tuned expression of our relationship with language, and it's valuable because what gets said is incredibly important. Mathematics professors debating about knot theory aren't creating technology that will save world hunger. They are "just putting numbers together." But obviously the field of math as a whole benefits from their research. Politics and marketing are going to be out there, regardless of whether you "think they are a detriment to society" or not. The key is to use them ethically and mindfully--which literature helps you do, and moreover, literature helps you think critically about the stories being told to you. One way or another, you are going to craft stories to make meaning and understand the world (not just scientifically, but culturally and ethically). Studying literature can help you do that and moreover, there are studies that show that under the right circumstances, reading literature can promote empathy--something the study of science or math, wonderful as it can be, can't do.
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@janisir4529 This is just more ignorance. There are subtle nuances in Harry Potter that differ based on the language, to say nothing about how Don Quixote differs from Spanish to English translation. You seem to have absolutely no sense that language can be used in profoundly subtle, precise, and complex ways. And sure, no problem, there is plenty else to do with your life. But I'm not sitting here pretending I know calculus because I can do arithmetic, lol.
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@janisir4529 Then what were you saying? You want to read it twice?
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@janisir4529 I'll be honest, I live for books and I wouldn't read two books in the same language unless I was practicing one of the languages 🤷‍♀
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@neonfroot I am absolutely, 100% sure you can't make any sort of rational, cogent argument for that at all, but you're absolutely welcome to try. Me and my English/Philosophy degree will be waiting 😄
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