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Alexander Corwin's avatar

this reminds me a bit of the divergence between popular poetry (i.e. music) and academic poetry that we all had a bit of a go about recently; instead of trying to compete on the grounds "really entertaining," the high-brow writers of fiction are competing on the grounds of "really formally experimental" and winning a different audience. this sort of corrodes the middle and leaves you with tightly honed mass-appeal stuff ("narrative w/o style") like reddit and twitter vs stuff that's maybe even actively hostile to mass appeal like "post-internet experimental stuff"

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Adam Tropp's avatar

Are you crazy i cant read books on my phone! Then how would i display all the Books Ive Read™ and my Vast Wealth of Knowledge™ on my shelf for the friends i dont have that dont come over because i dont have them?!

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eververdant's avatar

What you said about screens v. books reminds me of how when paper was invented, it was viewed as a "less serious" way to record information compared to parchment. Paper was cheap and utilitarian, while parchment was durable, weighty, and classic. So, paper wasn't used for religious or government documents or other high-status texts, until a few hundred years later.

In hindsight, this feels a little uppity. Maybe this kind of change will happen with screens too?

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Ludwig Yeetgenstein's avatar

That’s wild that you read Anna Karenina in only one day

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Caperu_Wesperizzon's avatar

The death of narrative seems to be very well narrated.

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Sam Oates's avatar

So the internet novel of sound bites without narrative doesn’t work.

But the other extreme, compressing narrative into a sound bite, doesn’t either (TV Tropes, “became corrupted by that thing”, etc).

Maybe the great internet novel looks more like Demons, but instead of looking at the Types of Guy tsarist Russia produced, it’s the Types of Guy we got from twitter. Using all the internet stereotypes as scaffolding.

I guess plenty of people have already tried this, maybe the trick is making it the size of an AITA post(s).

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sympathetic opposition's avatar

im not sure the extreme compression doesn't work! those two examples you gave are less trying to make a standalone narrative, their project is like categorizing

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token's avatar

I like that you defended us phone readers. But I don't like that you mocked us Hoopla-never-shut-up-abouters

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