Originally posted in 2009, the article focuses on classic novels and literary works that we claim to have read when in reality we have not. Among the statistics the article cites are the following:
65% of respondents said they had lied about claiming to have read literary classics. The four most common were:
- 42% lied about reading Nineteen Eighty-Four
- 31% lied about reading War and Peace
- 25% lied about reading Ulysses
- 24% lied about reading the Bible
I have attempted to read War and Peace but I found it very heavy and didn't latch on to it. I made it through about the first fifty pages or so, I long since donated it to a charity shop and forgot about it.
I have never read Ulysses.
I have read the Bible, and in doing so realised that most people haven't actually read it. From the very first book of the Bible - Genesis, there are inconsistencies and questions which even those who claim to be profound believers struggle to answer. I'll leave religious debate for another time however as that isn't the focus of this post.
The focus of this post is the fact that whilst many literary classics continue to hold their own amongst modern audiences, and are frequently referenced in pop culture to this day, the biggest barrier to getting people to actually read them is the misconception or the assumption that you already know the story. "I know what it's about" and "I know what happens" are the most frequent excuses for not reading these classics - whilst others dismiss them as irrelevant or simply not within their interest, the latter of which I can forgive and accept.
Relevance isn't really an argument you can truly make if you have never actually read the text. Relying only on what you have been told, and the regurgitation of the content leads you to build up an image of your own with details you have imagined in order to fill in the gaps. There is much more to be gained from first hand experience as opposed to second or third or however deep you want to go. This isn't a problem that is limited to literature, it is common in many other parts of our lives, but most prominently in entertainment and to an extent with food too.
We have come to a point where so many people share their experiences and do so with an openness that is devoid of any modicum of modesty, that we are encouraged to live vicariously. To live vicariously is to experience something through another. This can be demonstrated easily by looking at gaming channels on YouTube. Viewers who watch these channels and the people who are playing these games, do so in order to see them experience the game. The experience in and of itself becomes the entertainment, not the actual content. This can be demonstrated by the fact many of these gaming channels churn content. That is to say one plays a given game and other channels notice the game themselves and play it themselves. Some accuse them of copying each other, which to an extent they are, however those who fixate on that aspect are neglecting the reality of what is happening. People who watch one of these channels likely watch many others. The more they watch the more likely it becomes that the same games will be played. The viewer doesn't stop watching however, despite the same game, with the same story, the same characters etc, being played yet again, they continue to watch, because the game itself is not the focus of the entertainment, but the experience of the person playing is instead the real focus.
Games, Books, and even Food, all represent things which are part of this behavioural change. It is not limited to these three, but they are the easiest to use as demonstrations. Countless videos on YouTube show people reacting to their first time experiencing certain foods, mainly from other countries which they have never been to or simply never explored their food before. The same is true for games, countless videos show the same game being played by different people, some have played it before, some have not, some try and play it in a different way etc. Whether or not you as the viewer have ever experienced it for yourself first-hand becomes irrelevant. You watch because you either can't do it yourself but would like to, don't want to do it yourself but are curious, or have already done it yourself and want to compare reactions. The second of those three is easily demonstrated by the popularity of videos of horror games which some viewers are reluctant to play themselves but will happily watch others do so.
When it comes to books, one of the reasons most people don't read them for themselves is because it takes time and requires more effort than other forms of content - although services like Audible which provide audio books make this a lot easier as someone reads the content to you - it still takes time to hear a book, much longer than movie adaptations and summaries that other people will give you of what happens. Those alternative forms of delivery both sacrifice the level of detail for the sake of brevity. This lack of effort in consumption also applies to games, where some are considered too hard, or arduous, or repetitive to play yourself. To that end, you watch others do it and find enjoyment from their commentary which also breaks up the monotony of those parts of these games that become repetitive.
The idea of having someone else do the hard work for you is not new. This has been around for centuries and it has not been created as a result of technology. The person who does the hard work for you in many ways can be seen as a curator. Like the curator of an Art Gallery they seek out what to include, and select from it what they think you would be interested in. Whilst that is convenient, it does encourage laziness and does open you to having a very narrow, restricted view of the world. Curation can lead to reinforcement of the bubbles we can place ourselves inside.
I do have to wonder if part of the reason technology has progressed so far in such a short period of time is not because it actually benefits us - although I do believe it does - but rather because it enables us to do less. There has long been the argument that increased automation and the evolution of AI will lead to a world without work where unemployment becomes so widespread hardly anyone will actually work. I have to wonder whether that really is something that has become a concern as a result of technology, or if technology was created for that very purpose. If you define work in a traditional context of labour you can argue from the dawn of time that mankind has tried to avoid it as much as we can. You can argue that the industrial revolution which saw machinery used in farming for the first time was one of the earliest examples of technology being created to make life easier for humans by reducing the amount of work they have to do.
You can even go to the extreme and argue that the only reason society itself actually came about was because individual tribes of hunter gatherers decided that larger numbers meant delegation and that in turn meant you could do less work as an individual because the sum total of the collective work, far surpassed your needs. The idea that one person dedicated to one job meant that everyone else had one less thing to worry about. The curious thing about this whole origin story however is that whilst the point of specialization in this way helped society flourish, we now live in a society where we are actively pursuing the opposite - generalization. We increasingly want all of our goods and services to come from one place. We want a single retailer that sells everything we need because it means less work for us, but the irony is by pursuing that goal we also make less work for everyone else which is no longer leading to an improvement in our quality of life but rather to monopolization and exploitation.
There was an interesting experiment, although morally and ethically questionable, that was carried out in the 1950s by an Ethologist [person who studies animals] named John Calhoun, in which a group of mice were kept and placed in a Utopian environment. They were given everything they would need to thrive with abundance, they were allowed to flourish and grow in number uninhibited, and no predator was introduced. The result, they all died.
The population of mice grew and then exploded, reaching a point of saturation, after which it rapidly declined to the point of extinction. The experiment was repeated several times, and in each case, the same outcome occurred. The conclusion drawn was that any animal of a social nature has a natural limit to its population size which when reached then leads to its decline and eventual extinction.
What this means for humanity is interesting to contemplate. If you make the observation that the mice colony pursued growth and once the conditions for it were reached it expanded at a rapid rate. You can then also make the observation that once peak population is reached, the behaviour of the colony inverts and the behaviours that lead it to grow are abandoned and the opposing behaviours are adopted. Applying this to our observations of humanity itself as outlined above poses a rather interesting question - has humanity become a victim of its success? Have we as a society passed the point where we no longer strive to grow but are now behaving in ways that are accelerating our decline? In short, have we created a society that gives us so much of what we want without having to do very much to get it, that we are now incapable of sustaining ourselves when it is removed.
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