Given the comic is an echo of conversations like this, I think perhaps that if he is guilty of that then so too are you and I and all others here.
Myself, I say that to equate the modern proclivity for tweets with a degradation of intellectual rigor is as fallacious as imagining that the concise elegance of Tacitus foretold a dulling of Roman wit. Or something like that.
Will they (kids these days) like the style of old classics? Of course not, just as few native english speakers alive today wish to speak (or write) in the style of Shakespeare — breaking a long thing up into tweet-sized chunks, that is simply style, no more relevant than choice of paragraph or sentence length.
But to dismiss a generation’s capacity for engagement with monumental works (be they Les Mis, The Decline and Fall etc., Shakespeare, Dickens, or any other) on the basis of their chosen tools of communication betrays not only an ignorance of how often communication has changed so far — when Edward Gibbon wrote the Decline and Fall, literacy in the UK was somehere around the 50% mark, but still the illiterates could watch plays and listen to tales — but also modern attention spans when we also have binge-watching of entire series of shows as a relatable get-to-know-you-better topic on dating apps.
Myself, I say that to equate the modern proclivity for tweets with a degradation of intellectual rigor is as fallacious as imagining that the concise elegance of Tacitus foretold a dulling of Roman wit. Or something like that.
Will they (kids these days) like the style of old classics? Of course not, just as few native english speakers alive today wish to speak (or write) in the style of Shakespeare — breaking a long thing up into tweet-sized chunks, that is simply style, no more relevant than choice of paragraph or sentence length.
But to dismiss a generation’s capacity for engagement with monumental works (be they Les Mis, The Decline and Fall etc., Shakespeare, Dickens, or any other) on the basis of their chosen tools of communication betrays not only an ignorance of how often communication has changed so far — when Edward Gibbon wrote the Decline and Fall, literacy in the UK was somehere around the 50% mark, but still the illiterates could watch plays and listen to tales — but also modern attention spans when we also have binge-watching of entire series of shows as a relatable get-to-know-you-better topic on dating apps.