Most people are never choosing between Being and Time and an HN thread. But if they were forced to choose, we already know which one would dominate sheer engagement.
That doesn’t mean HN replaces philosophy — it just means that attention has its own economics. And any medium that captures attention will inevitably show qualities (good and bad) that heavyweight works simply can’t compete with.
The novels are unfinished though and I hardly believe they will be completed by him seeing how the penultimate novel has taken him over a decade to do about 75% of it and him being 77 already. I would never start a series I know it is unlikely to be completed.
Well said. Articles like these bring a sort of relief to me from the constant chaos of short-form media and the like. Very refreshing.
Now the problem is quality and production. Studios don't have to be very selective at all any more so median quality has gone way down. Streaming platforms have a ton of content and terrible discovery which means there are huge volumes of mid content and a few gems that unless they are popular are impossible to find.
Publishing had a huge demographic change and is suffering from a different kind of bias than in decades past which has the same kind of diversity-limiting effect, just substituting different groups being promoted and left behind.
Culturally all over media production there's also a problem with a difficult to make distinction – "trying to be diverse" vs "actual diversity" and the imbalance is pushing people into silos: politically, culturally, and in every other way.
I assure you, by sheer virtue of quantity, no matter what criteria you use YouTube/TikTok/Shorts/etc has a [set of videos] which demonstrates quality similar to any novel or literary work.
It's true there's more garbage out there than ever before, but this is an artifact of democratization of creation and this is good imho. I also reject the premise that time to creation is an indication of quality.
I think the main concern with short form video isn't taste or appetite, but just the ability to digest.[0]
Though the effects on attention might be more acute than we think. A friend of mine found that he's able to read books just fine, if he just switches off his electronics first. Suddenly his brain comes back online...
[0] See also: The mere presence of a smartphone reduces basal attentional performance [even when switched off]
Sometimes a friend would show me their feed and I'd be shocked at how different the content they are presented by their version of the algorithm.
There are a lot of people putting a lot of effort to create very interesting content and we should not belittle their work just to fein intellectual superiority.
There's really nothing inherently wrong about the format.
"Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the 'content' of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind...The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception." — Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media
> A closer look reveals that by vastly increasing the market for the published word, paperbacks also vastly increased the opportunities to make a living writing serious books
We can grant that this is true and yet it doesn't seem to provide encouragement. The equivalent today would be slop TikTok demand vastly increasing the opportunity for "serious" TikToks, whatever those may be.
A 'serious TikTok' is not a film. To think a film and a TikTok are alike is to make an elementary mistake in media analysis.
I can buy that we're going to get an explosion in fantastic short-form content. I'd say that the _Almost Friday TV_ group, who started a few years ago, are an example.
But this remains terrible news for predecessor mediums, who will suffer diminished demand and a general decline in the competency of audiences to enjoy those mediums ("great writers need great readers").
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...
Paperbacks will now only be sold in the larger trade paperback format.
tikok/YT shorts/IG reels is many orders of magnitude higher supply of slop than Simon Schuster paperbacks
tormeh•1h ago