Could we please start funding the humanities again? It's not just that we're losing the ability to read, we're losing the understanding of what reading even is
I notice more and more situations where people seem unable to discern the difference between 'media portraying a character' and 'authors and participants have same views and beliefs as character'. Insane.
And results in stuff like this:
Yeah, this seems really bad to me too. A character having a particular flaw or predilection for violence means the book or film must be condoning that behavior. Seems to me to be what you get when the primary forms of mass communication are advertising and propaganda.
Mr. Rogers and LeVar Burton did good childrens show work showing the diff between fiction and reality; but not just Stephen King, but Charles Dickens also had run ins with readers wishing to hold them to account for characters misfortunes, it's always happened to actors to some degree as well 1/
What I'm saying is fan passions for fiction, and scolding it, have always been a thing, it's just where it used to be isolated to correspondence and isolated weirdness at signings, now there's mass engagement channels, including those using the passion as an organizing principle. 2/
I mean, there's a whole section of The Republic that could be paraphrased as "arts left to their own devices have a weird space in civil society" and for the most part we think it's best to police only the extreme outliers in production and consumption, but yes, feedback is louder now and gamified.
