It's not just reading comprehension, it's the imagination that goes with it.
Text is active. It triggers the imagination. Visual imagery - especially electronic imagery - is consumed passively. What you see is what you get.
Especially with Gen Z, there's been a catastrophic collapse in the public's ability to imagine anything that hasn't been pre-digested by Hollywood movies, video games, D&D, and anime.
It's the same stock imagery over and over and over.
Older culture is "boring" because it doesn't follow the standard tropes, and that makes it incomprehensible.
It's a bizarre kind of deja nostalgia - the only futures that can be imagined are the ones that have been imagined already.
> Older culture is "boring" because it doesn't follow the standard tropes, and that makes it incomprehensible.
Hrm, I'm not sure what culture you're thinking of, but many genres are considerably _less_ trope-bound today than fifty years ago. Partly just because there is just _so much more stuff_. It is far easier to publish books. The end of the top-40 system as a curb on what music anyone actually gets to hear has allowed for far more diversity there. Total TV output today must be at least 10 times what it was 50 years ago, maybe more. All of this allows more experimentation.
> there's been a catastrophic collapse in the public's ability to imagine anything that hasn't been pre-digested by Hollywood movies, video games, D&D, and anime.
D&D? How does a book based roleplaying game fit into the argument about lack of imagination.
Older works often conform less closely to the tropes, because the tropes weren't established at that point. When a medium or genre is new it often goes through a Cambrian explosion phase where there are all kinds of wildly varied pieces, and then things settle down and coalesce on the specific approaches that have proven successful.
I wonder if people are downvoting you in good faith because I think you're on to something. My assumption is that denigrating mass media and pop culture comes across as "elitist".
Oh well. I mean, for the person who can look around and feel disdain toward these things, they deserve whatever shred of dignity the allegation subscribes them to.
"Second Order Illiteracy" is precisely what cripples imagination, or the ability to perceive things beyond the immediate senses. Passively consuming electronic media does the heavy lifting that the literary mind achieves.
> It's a bizarre kind of deja nostalgia - the only futures that can be imagined are the ones that have been imagined already.
If we toss the word "capitalism" into the fray of what you're saying I think this is what Mark Fisher meant by the "Slow cancellation of the future".
Possibly the idea is just too new / people who haven't seen it think it's just dunking on the young generation again. But for example there's an unexpected trend on social media just within the past month of a large amount of Gen Z not being able to read "third person omniscient" (a term I hadn't heard before but is pretty much just what it sounds like; from examples appears to be how all fiction I've read is written).
Text is active. It triggers the imagination. Visual imagery - especially electronic imagery - is consumed passively. What you see is what you get.
Especially with Gen Z, there's been a catastrophic collapse in the public's ability to imagine anything that hasn't been pre-digested by Hollywood movies, video games, D&D, and anime.
It's the same stock imagery over and over and over.
Older culture is "boring" because it doesn't follow the standard tropes, and that makes it incomprehensible.
It's a bizarre kind of deja nostalgia - the only futures that can be imagined are the ones that have been imagined already.