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cwalker's picture

Literature and Selection

So I was thinking of ckosarek's post. What is the future of the novel? What is the future of literature? It seems that our need to find something quick and easy to read, is swiftly limiting the amount of literary sources that are available. Rather than spending hours reading a novel, as we were taught to do in elementary school or by our parents, we spend hours on the computer speed reading over random texts, never going in-depth into the content. Is this a good thing? I mean let's be honest I like the efficiency of scanning through a text or an abstract online to see if the information I want is available, I can quickly search for data, rather than spend hours trying to find one piece of information. But at the same time I love picking up a book about a topic I am interested in and while looking for a specific piece of information, encountering a wide array of interesting data that I would not have found if I had just quickly searched it online.

So what is the fate of literature? Will it be shortened to please our want for shorter more compact forms of information? This sort of seems like natural selection, well except it is not quite natural, humans/societies are opting to select limited forms of literature that will thrive in coming generations. Our new "fittest" form of literature, is not the one with the all of the most precise and varied information, but rather the one that can give us the one that can give us the exact information in the least amount of characters as possible. Although I am not a fan of this selection process, I am well aware that I am a part of it, so where does this leave literature?

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