Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Will the Short Story Be Saved by These Guys?


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9 comments:

George said...

Those guys might save the short story, Patti, but the real question is who will save READING? My students would rather tweet and FACEBOOK and watch YouTube than read. The main student complaint about my courses is: "Dr. Kelley requires a lot of reading."

9:40 AM
pattinase (abbott) said...

I think you have the choice of how you get the magazine-and I would choose print. Maybe in the long run, more people will, too.

9:45 AM
Deb said...

George--A few years ago, I attended a meeting covering strategies for improving our students’ reading scores (the on-going drum-beat in the public schools). Using the popular reference point of an hour, the speaker said, “If all the time man has been on the earth is represented by one hour, then literacy would be represented by the last three seconds.” I don’t remember any of her strategies, but I do remember thinking that perhaps reading is one of those “dead-end” evolutionary developments that go nowhere and eventually fade out. Right now we assume there will always be a need for reading/writing, but perhaps we’ll end up with a small group of people—like medieval monks—being the only ones who know how to read and write.

On the other hand, based on my experiences in a junior high library, if everything written today were in some way about vampires, we’d have plenty of kids reading!

10:22 AM
Bill Crider said...

Things like this make me feel really old and out of it.

10:47 AM
pattinase (abbott) said...

Me, too, Bill. How can you tweet a story--isn't it only 140 characters or something like that? Or is the story only that long?

10:53 AM
Charles Gramlich said...

More power to them. I suspect it's somewhat faddish however.

2:01 PM
Todd Mason said...

No. But this is another example of electronic publishing. And a writer who has published half her work in electronic form, and a writer who runs his fanzine as a blog that is a locus for a number of subcultures, certain folks are perhaps not noting that they are riding the wave that they are claiming to be left behind by.

And it's typical of Moody's cluelessness that he thinks he's invented anything, if that was reported correctly. The equivalent of Twitter fiction has been quite faddishly popular in Japan for a while now.

2:53 PM
Todd Mason said...

Serially, Patti, to answer your last question.

2:54 PM
George said...

Deb's comment really hit home with me. I sometimes feel like a medieval monk holding back the new Dark Age in my part of a declining America. As Todd suggests, much of this new technology is being used in a frivolous fashion. Where is the twitter Shakespeare?

4:09 PM

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