/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22069310]

>highest literacy rate ever
>nobody actually reads

[Anonymous No.22069316]

>>22069310
I'm reading your post right now.

[Anonymous No.22069321]

>>22069316
have you ever been diagnosed with autism?

[Anonymous No.22069323]

>>22069321
Non-ironically, you are probably autistic yourself if you didn't gather the humor of that post.

>Verification not required.

[Anonymous No.22069326]

>>22069323
the irony

[Anonymous No.22069339]

reading is a meme

[Anonymous No.22069644]

>>22069339
state the defination of meme

[Anonymous No.22069646]

>>22069310
Literacy rates are on the decline in the United States

[Anonymous No.22069648]

>>22069310
It's like sexual liberation.

[Anonymous No.22069649]

a modern classic

[Anonymous No.22069655]

>>22069310
What sort of maladjusted freak would "read" when you can watch 5 second clip of teenage latina twerking on repeat, grind minecraft on second screen, listen to thumping nigger beats on your airpods and vape at the same time? We're reaching the logical conclusion of dopamine satisfaction and this is what it looks like, catch up or stay irrelevant.
"Reading" is Instagram aesthetics for white middle class hoes.

[Anonymous No.22069657]

>>22069310
reverse flynn affect
literacy in decline
anti-intellectualism rampant (hatred of tradition on the left; obsession with being ‘based’ over being correct on the right)

[Anonymous No.22069834]

>>22069310
>OP is literate and has access to countless books
>starts a shitpost thread on /lit/ instead of reading a book
Yeah, please do explain this.

[Anonymous No.22069837]

>>22069310
Literacy is now entirely utilitarian and reading has been replaced with more passive, less interpretive forms of media. The most obvious example of this is the total irrelevance of poetry in modern society.

[Anonymous No.22070002]

I have no idea why you people continue to pull this dogshit out of your prolapsed arseholes. People do read, they certainly read more than the average bloke 300 years ago did. If anything cheap paperbacks, digital reading and globalization brought literature to much more individuals. The only thing you might argue for, and I'd probably agree, is that there is more dogshit to be read and thus the average reader consumes texts of questionable quality when compared with back then.

[Anonymous No.22070014]

>I have no idea why you people continue to pull this dogshit out of your prolapsed arseholes. People do read, they certainly read more than the average bloke 300 years ago did.
The "average bloke" (ugh) 300 years ago couldn't read but the average educated man had a literary education that destroyed basically everyone in modern academia let alone the average """educated""" man today.
For instance, compare Edward Gibbon with anyone currently alive. Or the letters of civil war soldiers with the masters theses of current Harvard graduates. We are very dumb and illiterate today as a whole.

[Anonymous No.22070049]

>>22070014
>Or the letters of civil war soldiers with the masters theses of current Harvard graduates
Would you mind posting an example of each? That comparison left me very intrigued

[Anonymous No.22070105]

>>22070002
It’s not better because more people read more stuff. When he said “nobody reads” he meant “nobody reads classic literature” and he’s right. We’ve focused on quantity so much that we’ve sacrificed quality. This is the case with everything now and not just reading.

[Anonymous No.22070122]

>>22070105
Bullshit. That was not his implication and it certainly isn't how the rest of the thread took it judging by the replies. What you're saying is right, I don't disagree with it, but it's not false premise OP was going on about.

[Anonymous No.22070125]

>>22069644
DNA of the soul

[Anonymous No.22070441]

>>22070049
Dear Mother;
We are now awaiting steamers to transport the troops to Portsmouth. The Division reached here this morning, and are now going into camp. We will probably be delayed here several days.

It is now certain that this Division is to garrison Portsmouth for the rest of the summer, a most disgusting prospect, and a fate from which I hope to escape. Corcoran and his Michies will be sent to Washington, where, it is to be hoped, they will be placed in the front ranks.

The weather is delightful, but very hot, and there is the greatest abundance of blackberries.

I had a letter from Mande a few days ago. She wrote from Andover, where she was having great times, riding the pony, &c.

Hampton, before the war, was a delightful little town, very aristocratic, with broad streets, fine brick mansions, and noble shade trees. The Episcopal Church was the oldest, and certainly the most aristocratic, in the United States. The inhabitants were all F.F.Vs [First Family of Virginia] and looked down upon the rest of mankind. They would hardly associate with the officers at Fort Monroe and their families, whom they considered as low and parvenu.

Quick find after 5 minutes. A completely random pick from a collection of letters. Almost nobody writes like this anymore.

[Anonymous No.22070465]

>>22069310
it's almost like they redefined what "illiteracy" means

[Anonymous No.22071045]

>>22070049
I don't have it at hand but I remember one where the soldier was talking about how he and some others were discussing... Virgil? together while travelling, including witty quips in Latin, etc.

[Anonymous No.22071751]

>>22070441
Instant messaging has changed how we write correspondence. There's no longer need to be exact, descriptive or grammatically correct as each message can be immediately followed by clarifaction if required. And now with digital mediums, instead of saying
>The weather is delightful, but very hot, and there is the greatest abundance of blackberries.
People simply send a photo with a caption or emoji, or facetime and narrate their video. Romantic gestures and professional correspondence seem to be the only exceptions. It's a shame, the loss of artistry, but I doubt the educated would fail to write well if they were inclined to. The average person recieves and sends seventy odd messages a day. In this information age where your email is bloated by spam and promotions, your friends and family text you no more than a paragraph at a time unless it's something "important" and no one has anything all that interesting to say because we're all so closely (and constantly) "connected", taking the time to write something meaningful and well spoken is trivial and regretfully abstained.

[Anonymous No.22071787]

>>22069310
Reading is boring and sucks

[Anonymous No.22071810]

Read Coomaraswamy's Bugbear of Literacy right now

[Anonymous No.22071812]

>>22071751
I wish writing letters would still be a thing

[Anonymous No.22071815]

>>22069310
busy reading twiter and instagram

[Anonymous No.22071834]

>>22071751
Sometimes I spend 45 minutes writing a post on here only to find out the thread was deleted by the time I finished.

[Anonymous No.22071841]

>Progress? It is true that, today, at least in all highly organised countries, nearly everybody can read and write. But what of that? To be able to read and write is an advantage--and a considerable one. But it is not a virtue. It is a tool and a weapon; a means to an end; a very useful thing, no doubt; but not an end in itself... to what end, is it generally used today? It is used for convenience or for entertainment, by those who read; for some advertisement, or some objectionable propaganda--for money-making or power-grabbing-- by those who write... Generally, today, the man or woman whom compulsory education has made "literate" users writing to communicate personal matters to absent friends and relatives, to fill out forms--one of the international occupations of the modern civilised humanity--or to commit to memory little useful, but otherwise trifling things such as someone's address or telephone number, of the date of some appointment with the hairdresser or the dentist, of the list of clean clothes due from the laundry. He or she reads "to pass time" because, outside the hours of dreary work, mere thinking is no longer intense and interesting enough to serve that purpose... The higher the general level of literacy, the easier it is, for a government in control of the daily press, of the wireless, and of the publishing business--these almost irresistible modern means of action upon the mind-- to keep the masses and the "intelligentsia" under its thumb, without them even suspecting it.

>... “It is, we repeat, by far easier to enslave a literate people than an illiterate one, strange as this may seem at first sight. And the enslavement is more likely to be lasting. The real advantage of universal literacy is to tighten the grip of the governing power upon the foolish and conceited millions. That is probably why it is dinned into our heads, from babyhood onwards, that ‘literacy’ is such a boon. Capacity to think for one’s self is, however, the real boon. And that always was and always will be the privilege of a minority, once recognised as a natural élite and respected.

[Anonymous No.22071845]

>>22070441
What do you think soldiers today write to their families?

[Anonymous No.22071905]

>>22071845
>Darling, in the time I've been here I've seen enough of hell. So many deaths were not in Chechnya or Afghanistan. The sea of human meat. But that's not why I'm leaving.
>We Russian people are nothing here, but the Chechens rule. They drink, go rogue, rape and fuck everyone, but no one will do anything.
Ksenia, they took away all the money that you sent and did something to me. Please know that I resisted. And remember that you and I don't owe anyone. Now for sure. Love you. Meet me on the other side.

[Anonymous No.22071911]

>>22069321
lol the ironing is killing me

[Anonymous No.22072075]

>>22071845
Kaytlyn
Sup with u? Wishin I could tap that ass lol. Send me more nudes. I showed some to Jaylen he said he def would hit so maybe we can party when I get back LOL. Today we paraded in dresses to show some Afhani boys what it meant to be trans and Kevin shoved a dildo up his ass shit was hilarious.
Peace
Brayan

[Anonymous No.22072678]

>>22069310
We read, but we can detect bullshit from the first chapter already so we stopped and put the book at the "can't throw, don't wanna keep" stack. It's pile high

>Verification not required

[Anonymous No.22072683]

>>22069310
Most people nowadays at least have a better grasp of core concepts in math, reason and logic than the average person in the mythological past you likely idolize.

[Anonymous No.22072698]

>>22069310
its unironically better to have a ruling class educated in greek, latin, arithmetic and so on instead of forcing some board-approved curriculum on the entire poulace

[Anonymous No.22072771]

>>22071841
This person has absolutely no familiarity with human history

[Anonymous No.22072823]

>>22071905
>the "intercepted Russian phonecalls" where they extensively list every gory warcrime they've totally commited are now replaced with "intercepted Russian letters" where they tell their wives about all the burly men that totally raped them
Back to your /k/ontainment board.

[Anonymous No.22073007]

>>22069310
There is actually a causal relationship there.
>flood of low quality trash
>now nothing is worth reading, or the effort of sifting through the trash to find what is readable

[Anonymous No.22073117]

>>22070014
Sorry to say this anon but Edward Gibbon was a fucking retard (and admittedly also an intellectual revolutionary of his day). If you believe him to be a genius you are unfortunately probably a retard yourself.
Perhaps join academia and stay a while. As far as History is concerned, I think you will discover that some academics not only reach but vastly exceed your standards.

[Anonymous No.22073210]

>>22073117
How is he a retard?
He obviously isn't, first of all, but the point is he read more on the subject than any living academic and synthesized it into a single sweeping work, writing on a quill.
Who could write something like that today? That was an academic 250 years ago, where are the similar ones now?

[Anonymous No.22073980]

>>22073210
>How is he a retard?
A cursory glance at his writing on religion would suffice. I am not friendly towards Christianity myself, but it's quite obvious that the shit he wrote on religion was just a veiled critique at religion in Britain, and this is partly why so many liberal queers circlejerked about it back in the day. As I said, he was a genius writer and organiser, but as far as I am concerned he lacked the qualities of a historian. If you cannot even separate yourself from your own prejudices, you can never understand a different time.
>That was an academic 250 years ago, where are the similar ones now?
Four of my lecturers are top scholars of incredible talent, whose opinions I would trust far more than Gibbon's. Many other lecturers were half-baked. But academia still has some really talented and insightful people in it. Just because the hacks have the political clout and control doesn't mean that the others do not exist.

[Anonymous No.22074041]

>>22073980
Did you actually read him? What did he say about Christianity that was so bad?
Your post sounds like Chatgpt platitudes and equivocation.

[Anonymous No.22074069]

>>22074041
>increase in spending on religion due to conversion to Christianity was one of the causes for the downfall of the Roman Empire
Unless you have records for all spending that ever happened in the Roman Empire, this is a pretty absurd claim to make.

[Anonymous No.22074122]

>>22069310
>everybody reads
>everybody can also write
>most people write garbage
problem is that too many people can write and use their jew connections or dishonest ways to promote their shitty books

[Anonymous No.22074150]

This is not a paradox but a perfecty logical consequence of universal literacy. Mass education has led to a decrease in inteligence. Trying to lift the lowest only ends up dragging down the highest. The elites know this and laugh as they send their kids to superior schools while the plebs go to public schools where no child is left behind allegedly.

[Anonymous No.22074764]

>>22070002
>People do read, they certainly read more than the average bloke 300 years ago did.
And certainly less than the average bloke 100 years ago did

[Anonymous No.22074886]

>>22074069
I don't remember him making that claim. So I'm guessing you didn't read him?