The cultural decline of literary fiction

It's a deep problem with music and video games. I mean, can a Mario game really top Super Mario World? Not to say some later games aren't fun, but Persona 6 could only really top Persona 5 by being something really different, and if it was different it wouldn't be Persona 6.

This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.” There are a million metrics by which we might try to measure it, but well… that’s just not how art works. Thinking this way indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of what art is. Probably one of the most important metrics is “relevance to, and effect on, the state of the world as it is right now.” And pretty much any arbitrary “1000 best” list is not going to take that into account.

That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way. Part of art is how it speaks to the listener. In fact… I might argue that that’s all of art, with metrics about it being an entirely different, not-art thing.

(I say all this as a classical musician and senior software engineer with a math background, myself.)

There is also an issue that ranking is easily available now.

Of course, recommendations existed in the past as well, and stuff like classic literature was ranked for centuries at this point, but still, I think we relied on word of mouth more.

Nowadays you can easily get a list of "top ..." in any area and chances are high that it is all old stuff.

> I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The old books haven’t gone away. Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers.

That's a real phenomenon in music. New works have to compete with the entire body of existing work, some of which is pretty good.

I kind of think a lot of these are bought as gifts, not really a thing people actually intend to read.

I would say every genre of media has this problem. A form of media might exist for thousands of years, but genre and fashion always evolve in new directions, because what's the point of creating more of what exists already.

> A new movie comes out: what are the odds of it being more worth your while than one on the existing IMDb Top 1000? Decreasing

Not really? This is a rather "mechanical" view missing the bigger social part - for example, a big part of that worth is the social conversation, and the chances of your friends to watch that new movie vs the top 1000 isn't decreasing.

Also there is this factor of new films being able to incorporate "current" events which old films can't, and that's another factor of worth that's not decreasing with time

> it spoke the language of memory,

We are living in the tower of Babel. No one speaks the same "language" anymore. I truly believe this was the true metaphor behind that story. Once a civilization reaches a certain level of standard wealth people hyper converge on their personal beliefs to the point where they can literally no longer speak about other forms of personal belief or preference that conflicts with their own. And they no longer are coerced into going along with another belief system (compromise) due to economic need from the majority. At that point the civilization unravels due to lack of coherent direction.

Look at all the arguments about definitions of clearly defined words in modern politics.

Then why is Kurt Vonnegut still so popular?

I vaguely recall some sociology and media theory strands that make arguments similar to the quoted post—that we are entering or have already entered an era of post-literacy. Our new language is a language of images, (tiktok, instagram), immediacy, and literalness (does anyone even understand allegory anymore? Does the average piece of media ever express a metaphor?). I don't have numbers on it, but my teacher friends tell me that the typical student's reading comprehension skills have tanked in the past few years.

The unpleasantness is definitely a problem. It's like the cool writers want to prove they are making something challenging by stripping away all of the sugarcoating that we normally love in narrative (and food!). I realize that the kind of pat endings that are so common in broadly popular narratives are a bit dull and predictable, but they're better than watching the protagonist go through the realities of life. We all have to suffer the worst parts of life each day. No need to do it at night too.

Right. It's just like music. Some people can appreciate noise music, some people view it as just that: abrasive noise. It's a matter of taste. For some, the unpleasantness is of aesthetic interest and they have an aesthetic appreciation for it.

So it isn't that we become stupid from browsing, it's that the internet has an unlimited supply of critics?

How has that changed since the mid 20th Century?

This remind me of something. In music criticism there are two terms, Rockism and Popism.

I feel like the intial drive against "Rockism" was to embrace different subcultures, like punk and post-punk, but later the result was "Popism", which became its own kind of orthodoxy, pushing critics into treating label-engineered chart pop as deep just because it’s popular or polished.

Back when I was a journalism student wanting to work in music in the early 2000s I used to frequent early internet hangouts for critics and it was interesting to see the change happening progressively, with critics increasively and progressively adopting a certain air of superiority over anyone who couldn't conflate popularity with genius.

For me the big chasm was over brazilian funk music. Sure I could see it a few times as somewhat interesting, and I could understand the appeal as dance music, but the old guard was trying to use old arguments to push it as "descendants of Kraftwerk" while the new guard was using socio-anthropological arguments to defend it. The music rarely stood for itself, and when it did was often on the back of previous music. I'm not saying it's automatically "bad" but its positive qualities were blown out of proportion by critics for me that it become grating.

Today the internet made it all even worse, lots of "pop culture centric" communities are 5% about music and 95% about the personal life of artists, the TMZ-level gossip, the memes, the constant fighting virtual wars with other pop-music fandoms, the metacircular discussion around the fandom itself...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism

I think these are factors to the extent that one sort of needs formal training and schooling in the historical development of the form to appreciate experimental and more contemporary work. The same can generally be said about visual art.

Because of that, yeah, hyper-specialization in schooling and a general movement toward stem means that a lot of people don't actually acquire the requisite background to engage with and appreciate modern work in a sufficient way—just like someone untrained in computing probably would not have an easy time understanding or appreciating significant breakthroughs in computer science.