The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction
was that a problem in society. “We’re rushing through everything and forgetting to savor the words, the food, the wine or whatever it is we’re doing in the moment,” I said. “But these authors know how to grab the attention spans of readers who don’t normally have one and
Candace Havens • A Case for the Winemaker: An Addictive Small Town Whodunit Mystery (Ainsley McGregor Book 1)
But the real reason is that the market for clickbait is saturated, and longform feels fresher, more vital, more rewarding.
Ted Gioia • Has the Internet Reached Peak Clickability?
But let’s turn around and look at those folks in the audience. It’s sobering to see what they’re actually doing. Consumers of culture have so many options to choose from—so what do they pick?
The brutal truth is that there’s an ocean of stuff out there, but consumers sip it with a narrow straw.
Ted Gioia • The State of the Culture
It’s possible that the idea of an “important” work of popular art, like the idea of movie stardom, simply can’t survive the transition to the digital era. The journalist and novelist Ross Barkan has done interesting writing on this theme, borrowing from Bret Easton Ellis’s concepts of “Empire” and “Post-Empire” to describe a shift from the post-Wor... See more
Opinion | Can We Make Pop Culture Great Again?
“I’ve been finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs,” laments Hugh McGuire, the founder of the public domain audiobook service LibriVox and (at least until recently) a lifelong reader of literary fiction. “Let alone chapters. Chapters often have page after page of paragraphs.” He describes what’s shifted in the fo
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