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Message: <blockquote data-quote="shurai" data-source="post: 3248219">Did you notice the shining gem of good news in there?  People are writing more then ever.  I tend to think that's very good news.Anyway, one of my favorite lines from the film Good Will Hunting runs, roughly, "You f***in' people baffle me. Spend all your money on these f***in' fancy books.  You surround yourselves with 'em and they're the wrong f***ing books."This insight is critical.  People who are going to waste too much time on brain candy can do so in text, sound, or video just as easily.  Folks used to read Danielle Steele and Tom Clancy, now they're more likely to play The Sims and Call of Duty.  Second verse, same as the first.Also, it occurs to me that the internet and video games (evidently the culprits here, according to the NEA's study) are all very new, and that newly-invented media and artforms are always derided.  When Jazz really started to get rolling, for instance, it was criticized for being morally and musically worthless or even harmful, especially when compared with that perennial sacred cow of good-for-you entertainment, the symphony orchestra.Paradoxically, most of a century later, my state university holds weekly jazz concerts -- performed by professors of jazz.  This is why I quit paying attention to official opinions of the arts:  They badmouth a perfectly legitimate artform in one decade, then in another they hand out doctorates in it.I'm not really saying it's a good thing that literacy appears to be on the decline.  Rather, I'm questioning the implicit premise that the new stuff is somehow inferior.</blockquote>

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