/lit/ - Literature

You ever watch youtube videos created by people under 25-30 and notice they slur all their words, misuse idioms constantly, etc.? It's terrifying. We've regressed to pre-literacy. They're clearly doing something different from what a truly literate person is doing when they speak. Something about how they parse words and phrases is different, they are "best guessing" at too many things.

>>15293292
im a zoomer and i write very well

>>15293311
We are going back to pictograms

I've written a 15,000 word novella and it turned out ok

>>15293311
Neil Postman predicted this.

>>15293563
who

>>15293330
What's wrong with this? It gets people reading at least

>>15293781
weak

>tfw Millennial

My generation is going to churn out great writers and poets while the Zoomers wallow in stupidity. Maybe the generation AFTER the Zoomers will be literate again.

>>15293781

>>15293330
Honestly that's quite cute, would buy it if I saw it at the shop.

>>15293781
Ah, yes, the Stephen King Conjecture. I see you're a man of culture.

>>15293841
Then I hate you

>>15293292
filtered

The social forces that produce novels and poetry are all but gone now, it's an exhausted art form, it'll never be in the driver's seat of culture again.

>>15293829
>millennials
>been on earth roughly 3 decades now
>churned out roughly jack shit
Has a single generation ever been so JUSTed?

>>15293759
Exactly

>>15293914
Poetry will live forever.

>>15293311
>they are "best guessing" at too many things
This was already apparent ten years ago, they were physically stunted in physiological benchmarks to match by comparison, age for age.

>>15293968
Poetry is for homos

>>15293292
Just you wait. Books dropping in a half a decade or so.

That's because they have skipped the logical steps to get to greatness for a human life.

They have immediate access to almost all of humanity's knowledge on command, in the palm of their hands, on the comfort of their beds, whereas any human before that would've had to at least walk their way to a library, and in the worst case sacrifice years of their lives and savings to get anywhere near an answer.

Without earning any of it.

It's the post-war USA 'greatest country in the world' mentality. They've earned nothing, it was just given to them and they barely are aware of the historical processes and complexities that allowed it.

>>15294751
ok boomer

gotta say i was a dumbfuck at 20 but zoomers are a whole new level of dumbfuck. they're just vacous, completely so. i had aspirations like hell 15-20 and worked my ass off practicing them. zoomers just go on tiktok all day and put emojis all over the place. i think their brains rewired to the point they literally THINK in emojis.
t. 28 year old young end mil. didn't have a phone until 16 and no smartphone until 25.

>>15294880
cool, have a medal

>>15294880
Very similar experience here, 31 now. Zoomers also seem to take for granted that internet personalities are significant. Like, if I were to fall for that shit and develop a bad habit of watching gay ecelebs all the time, it would still be "me" falling for "it," it would be something that happened to me. But zoomers seem to take it for granted, prior to any thoughts, that their experiences are to be mediated through forms pre-established by people with recognizable names on social media.

>>15294880
t. boomer

>>15294859
>>15294902
The problem isn't what you are saying, it's that you're not saying anything with it. The mental actual content of your post is just a downvote. Why not say something?

>>15294915
Because you’re not saying anything of value to respond to?

remember when zoomers were being heralded as the conservative conscious demigods that would rise up and deliver society from the hands of the special snowflake millenials

oh what a difference a few years can make

>>15294936
Zoomers just flat-out need to be treated like sheep since that's what they are. Their meme name has become darkly ironic because they have, in fact, turned out to behave exactly like Boomers. Boomers were easily manipulated and swayed by the mass media of their day: television and print journalism. Zoomers are easily manipulated and swayed, too, by the mass media of OUR day: social media and video bloggers. Different media but the same effect: a totally docile, servile obedience. Boomers were sheep and Zoomers are too. I bet you could get Zoomers to kill themselves en masse if all their favorite YouTube stars advocated it. I bet if a bunch of YouTubers tried to get their viewers to drink bleach we'd have thousands and thousands of Zoomer deaths, because they just blindly follow what they watch and consume via digital platforms.

>>15294907
If you're talking shit about zoomers being stupid, you might be right
cause I have no idea what the fuck you just said.
Only half serious/half joking. What are you referring to when saying "falling for it"? It seems completely disconnected from the first part of your post.

>>15294915
because you (or whomstever the fuck i replied to) lack the cognitive ability to make any sort of coherent argument
>That's because they have skipped the logical steps to get to greatness for a human life.
do you not see how insanely myopic this sentence is? how can you define the greatness of a life? by how many books theyve written? by how many retards parrot and misparrot their ideas on anonymous Indonesian square dancing forums? where did you learn about this people? did you earn this knowledge of the dead people whose ghost dicks you ride? you are such a bumbling retard with no sense of direction in life or any sense of empathy and ability to understand how a real human functions that i think it is downright laughable that an imbecile like you try to give labels that a four year old could come up with to a persons entire fucking existence. and to top of the midwit sundae, doing the exact thing to an entire generation of people that you havent met because your too busy shitposting is the epitome of dunce-hood. take your ass to a fucking library, boomer

>>15294962
>zoomers are modern boomers
it all makes sense now. so mils are modern version of silent gen? everything checks out perfectly. then whatever, gen alpha is going to be a bunch of druggie edgelords.

>>15294962
I don't doubt it. My only silver lining in life is that being a millennial gives me a greater chance to be a great writer

>>15294975
dumb zoomer

>>15295046
You're responding to two different people. I called you a zoomer for making lazy, low-content replies. You replied with an epic takedown of someone else completely.

Thanks for replying with substance this time. Maybe try doing it FIRST, next time.

>>15295134
just shut the fuck up, holy shit

>>15295163
its ok little guy, go play fortnite and calm yourself

someone make fun of me for being a zoomer please god

>>15295163
>just shut the fuck up, holy shit

>>15295134
yes I know that dummy, I specified so in my post

Ah, a thread full of people past their prime who feel nothing but contempt for us innocent yet blooming creed. You can’t grasp the simple fact that every generation has the mindless masses and few great thinkers. Where as the boomers, Xers and millennials didn’t have the context of the late 20th/early 21st century to mold them, even the dullest of zoomers understand the post-ironic cultural collapse we are going through. While some may respond by giving in, the greatest of the zoomers will do conjure ideas beyond anything you could ever think of and ultimately lead humanity to either its glory or destruction, simply because we were born at the right time.

In short: dilate, sneed, have sex, and FUCK non-zoomers

>>15295229
>In short: dilate, sneed, have sex, and FUCK non-zoomers

>>15293914
This. Expect great videogames, movies and music but little to no literature. The new generations are visually-oriented.

>>15293292
Millennials have been here far longer than us and also churned out jack shit. Clean your room asshole.

>>15295229
>>15295247
>>15295256
the cope lmao

>>15295256
>Millennials have been here far longer than us and also churned out jack shit. Clean your room asshole.

>>15293330
This shit is in a textbook? Fuck it. When will the khali yuga end?

I need help bros. I am very visually oriented, so my prose generally sucks ass since I have trouble writing. My story is very good I think, but my writing sucks.

>>15293330
i find it strange how this book is used to disparage zoomers when the dude who wrote it is 34

>>15295315
No, and nobody actually reads those anyways

>>15295411
Yeah upon reexamination I see that. It looked like school textbook on the left. Doesn't make it any less terrible though.

>>15293914
why don't you make some you fucking loser?

>>15293407
>only 15,000 words
Try again, zoomer

>>15295178
>>15295207
>zoom coomer boomer pbbbft braaap cumshit
what "intellectual pursuits" were you after at 18-20, gramps? playing halo? Listening to linkin park? curating your myspace? making shitty image macros? finding more distractions from the slow burn we inhereted?
die faster

>>15295519
fornicating your mother for once

>>15295519
dude just stop posting, youre only gonna get more shitty wojaks

>>15295519
>die faster

>>15295207
kek
Chill out kid.

yes i am a zoomer, yes i only read exclusively non-fiction, yes i don't give a shit about politics, yes i hate cringe culture.
keep seething boomers.

>>15295639

Zoomers already have a massively more interesting music culture than millennials (bladee, 100 gecs, black midi, etc.) so it is just a matter of time before we outdo them in literature desu.

>>15295777
oh no no no no no

>>15294962
>I bet you could get Zoomers to kill themselves en masse if all their favorite YouTube stars advocated it. I bet if a bunch of YouTubers tried to get their viewers to drink bleach we'd have thousands and thousands of Zoomer deaths, because they just blindly follow what they watch and consume via digital platforms.
If only.

>>15294962
wont be long before someone uses deepfake/similar for this

literally every form of media is going to shit now that younger generations are taking the torch

Millenials and Zoomers are overwhelmingly immature, self-centered, and unable to think critically. Loyalty and trust for each other is all but dead, we're content looking out for number one. Most of them are lonely. Social media was a mistake.

>>15293829
>generational thinking
Congratulations, you are a puppet

Sometimes I think /lit/ is the only board worth a damn and then i see threads like this

Zoomer meems also suck

>>15293292
>young people dumb
how have you never realized this ever, OP?

What I find weird is how a lot of people my age lack early memories. My earliest memories go back to when I was 3, but a lot of my friends, most of whom are about the same age as me, claim to not remember anything before the age of 7, or worse still, the age of 10. I sincerely don’t believe them, but they are adamant about it and I find it concerning.

>>15293781
people shouldn't be reading
they should be tilling fields

>>15293407
I've written a 3m word novel cont. story and it's shit. Just started with the classics and turning into literary fict.

>>15293330
Unironically brilliant

>expecting a demographic that is barely in its 20s to be good at writing

Writing skills come with age and experience that most zoomers just don't have. Post this thread again in a decade, see what response you get then.

>>15297721
Yukio Mishima-the most famous, gifted, and prolific young
Japanese writer-who, at thirty-two, already has some fifty volumes of
work—novels, stories, essays, poetry.

>>15297730
Mishima had way more life experience by that age than your average zoomer has today. This just supports my point.

>>15293311
Literally Marshal Mcluhan predicted all of this. Back in the 1960s he was saying that Television will lead us back to the oral age of hunter and gatherers. Well YouTube, Twitch, and Netflix are basically TV on steroids.

I encourage you to read predicated if you want to understand why and how Mcluhan predicted this so well

>>15295247
Where are the great movies and songs? All I see and hear is sloppy diarrhea. Maybe I should get my head out of this toilet bowl...

>>15297741
I started reading literary fiction, but I've already written 3m words with little to no life experience and sitting all day inside the house playing vija.

>>15297741
>>15297768
To add up, I will catch up and one day, I will make it into the canon, I hope, I will do it! Fuck you, nigger! Ha-ha!

>>15297768
Yeah, but is it good though? Probably not. Writing something without either a shit ton of empathy or having experienced real pain, loss, growth, etc. may be technically good, in that it uses words well, but it doesn't have that soul-hitting impact that *good* literature has

>>15297787
Fair enough, but at the very least, I'm using it as a head start to improve my prose before obtaining the needed literary fiction, history, philosophy and life experience needed to actually build something decent. It's, at the very least, better than nothing.

>>15297800
That is very true. Maybe in 10 or 20 years you'll end up making something incredible enough to end up on my book shelf. In the meantime, keep at the prose and keep putting yourself out there. Life is to be experienced, not speculated on.

>>15297749
>>15293311
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_orality

>>15298497
>ambiguity, paradox, irony ... are fast disappearing.
If anything they're becoming more and more prevalent. Shitposting is quickly becoming the central means of electronic communication. Everything is a joke now. Internet points are won by how gracefully retarded you make yourself come across.

>>15298497
All according to plan.

>>15293932
I agree. My generation has totally succumbed to status angst.

>>15293292
have you noticed that most zoomers have completely lost the ability to narrate normally? or to respond in a non-cliche way aka not using meme phrases every other message?
peak zoomer humor is just labelling objects on meme templates or photos. usually some incredibly cringe shit like "me / life / depression / social anxiety" etc.

you could probably label this retardation something like "tiktok lexical disorder" because tiktok is the essense of how they speak - short, digestable by all, flashy, patterned and eerily similar.

>>15297749
I don't think that's accurate nowadays, the key difference between social media and TV is that social media involves active participation as opposed to the passive consumption of TV, radio, and the like.

>>15295402
I remember it being ripped on here years ago, I thought he was a little older. Either way it'll be some boomer's kid and that's the only reason anyone thought this bullshit was a good idea.

No one is going to mention the anime titties

>>15295838
>now that younger generations are taking the torch
every form of media is controlled by the same class since the post war period, generations have nothing to do with any of it

>>15293932
We made a lot of memes.

>>15298840
> zoomers on social media
That's exactly what it would be like if TV had a comment section, and shitty magazines posted all the letters they recieve.

>>15293563
Amusing Ourselves to Death was really an interesting title because the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that many if not most human domains simply seemed to primarily be focused at providing amusement before our ultimate demise. Whether it's reading, playing games, conversation, sports, drinking, and so on, virtually the entirety of human existence with the one notable exception of actions designed towards our survival, tended to be about providing either amusement or comfort before we end up six feet under.

Reading requires much more careful thought than watching TV or YouTube: it's more difficult but the reward is greater too. Obviously I recognise this and I am not a hedonist, but let us not be so vain as to think what we do is anything more transcendental than a merely a 'higher form' of amusement.

>>15293292
They're 12 dude, give them a minute.

>zoomer literature

>>15295519
There's a fairly nuanced argument being made in this thread - one the anon brought up - that we're a product of material and historical circumstances. As time changes, technology intrudes on our life and that alters or creates new habits. It's an age-old argument that jumps in entertainment are inhibiting our intellectual growth - I know someone my age who is, by most accounts, a genius. He is addicted, like most awkward young men, to videogames. Maybe that would have been Quake fifteen years ago, but as these games get better and better (and the internet offers more and more easy distractions) our collective willpower is definitely being sapped. To look at the verbal quality of Abraham Lincoln and compare it to Trump and the modern American is staggering. There is a real point to be made in saying that technological developments are hindering our intellect and that's reflected in coming generations.

There is, of course, another side to this argument which is that we have mass literacy and acccess to more information than we know what to do with. There's an incredible potential for growth. It's rose tinted glasses, too, to claim that humans from one time period were "better" instead of just exposed to distinct historical circumstances. And like the of demonisation past forms of entertainment have had (Plato hated poetry, the early victorians ridiculed novels, and so on), the things we take as distractions could be praised as intellectual pursuits in five decades.

The issue is how we are ever going to preserve a huge wealth of verbal knowledge in a way that's accessible. We're at a sort of cultural vacuum right now, were the vast majority of people are now losing their connection to a millennia of written language. And as that mass grows, it makes it harder and harder for the artist to deploy complex ideas.

>>15293968
Potteryfags are the worst of plebians

>>15293311
You're just thinking of weed addicted wannabe nigger zoomers

>>15295777
>Blip Bloops and Xanax'd niggers
>Music culture

>>15299207
one of those is a rock band and none of them are black lmao

>>15298709
Yeah, I think irony in particular is at its strongest in our culture ever since it colluded with the internet during the late 00s, but how "depthful" is this irony? It's also necessitated on the visual as much as on words. Is it really of the same quality?

Birkerts' essay is p good, though. Predicting trends especially concerning something abstract like human communication is a difficult task so it's a hit/miss at times, but when it hits, it hits hard. Going to have to read his Gutenberg Elegies some time. That's where the essay is from iirc. All of these writers are underneath McLuhan's shadow, in the end, though. He's more relevant as time passes. Even the harder section of the soft sciences are vindicating him. Going to interesting what studies come out 20 years from now concerning the brains of our guineapig Zoomer friends.

http://www.nouspace.net/john/download/langtexttech/birkerts-electronic-millenium.pdf

>>15295777
>black midi
the concept the name of the band was taken from is actually more interesting than they are

The culture such as it is means to be a literate, intellectually curious and engaged person means to be in active defiance of your surroundings. Take what started with millennials and apply it more completely to zoomers. IQ has been falling steadily for the past decades and the cause has been ascribed to environmental factors. Pervasive media technology, as the main driver of advertisement-based consumer capitalism, shapes a mental disposition suited to its aims. One in which attention spans are short, dissatisfaction with the present constant, and impatience with the subtle and intangible, all ubiquitous traits of trash culture, are directly caused by this media environment. If liking math or reading was seen as cool it would deter this consumption paradigm, and essentially the values we see in the mass are the values of this ruling ideology of consumption.

The values of social media are exactly these values of advertisement and consumption, and because social media is increasingly also *socialization* media, a direct. chain of causality in the intellectual degradation of the culture can be traced

The goal of the consumption-based society is not to inspire reasonable, well-educated, curious citizens who want to engage at little to no cost with the history of ideas. It's to promote a reactive, impatient, hyper-stimulated subject with a short dopamine reward fuse who is constantly consuming and resetting the reward trigger. This is social type who is both trained and expected to find no reward in anything besides the use of the instruments--social media and the like--which support the advertisement industry. The result has been an "atrophy of experience," the cheapening and watering down of subjectivity with media filler and the implicit promotion of misology, hostility and resistance to nuance, thought, or questioning.

In fact and advertisement schema is the main interface by which people seem to interpret reality. You see it especially in young people but the gears were turning since the heyday of the boomers. People who do want something more than consumption shop around for religions, values, ideologies, as if the whole of intellectual history was one big box store or Amazon inventory listing. There's an entire generation of spiritually and intellectually rootless young people whose means of interpreting the world has been the warped lens of the internet which by its nature cuts the strings of place and ungrounds the living tradition of the cultural substances it absorbs, rendering it as decontextualized "content" suspended in a neutral manifold.

Zoomers aren't intrinsically dumber and more illiterate than past generations, they've just been exiled and disinherited from context and tradition and given a vacuous culture to work with.

>>15299400
>>15299571
woah, good post. no really. next level shit

reminder that soundcloud rappers are the only poets left

High age zoomer here.
Half the girls I knew at school were your regular girls plus the snapchat/instagram trash, the other half were shitposters
Half the guys were your regular kinda sporty guys, the other half were shitposters
It was a minority but you could tell some people browsed 4chan based on their fast meme adoption or straight up talking about it. Some of these people were influential intelligent guys and girls, their mannerisms obviously went to the friends and spread through the school and other zoomers.
The general philosophy I've gathered most of these people believe is that the world is a joke, laugh at everything and don't take things too serious. They are smart enough to know how the world works and will do what is necessary to survive and succeed as they don't believe life is worthless, but the world is still a big fucking joke with how everything operates from the media to the politicians and they can't help but laugh at it all. It's a clown world.

>>15299712
To add many of them actually were knowledgeable about many things and still are intelligent, but they just don't take shit seriously.
One example is a girl I knew, she would sometimes seig heil and talk about nazis and her favorite dictators and genocides of the past while smiling and laughing as it was all ironic, but she knew about all the things she talked about because she really liked and studied history. She was also one of the most popular girls at my school like I mentioned and was an influencer as guys were attracted to her and girls wanted to be around her.

>>15299761
She sounds like a ride.

I'm noticing quite a large trend of apolitical people adopting racist or sexist jokes almost as a badge of pride. It's feeds into a kind of a general nihilism and I think, is sort of cathartic in a way. It's clear with figures like Trump - who I don't like - that a lot of people are having 'taboo' thoughts are tired of pretending they're not human. It becomes a sort of private joke.

>>15298843
>I thought he was a little older
he might be, i couldnt find his actual age anywhere, just that he went to school in 2006

>>15299821
I view those people in a pretty distinct category to actual racists however (although they overlap). It's almost like by acknowledging that people have these thoughts, they become less serious.

>>15297721
It’s not even producing a great novel, it’s the way they communicate and think

>>15299833
Yeah it's called a joke. Lighten up Francis.

>>15299712
This
I'm a 20yo zoomer and everyone has taken the clown pill desu

We have a romanticized version of depression which leads us to believe that melancholy and the will to die makes us profound thinkers and novelists when in actual reality this condition deteriorates the mind and its ability to produce content. How much writing can a person create if they’ve spent most of their lives in their beds or on ritalin and adderall?

>>15298497
>>15299346
This is some good stuff, thanks for linking it. Had to pause my reading and share this footnote in particular.

Why do you people even care about it? Literature has long since reached its peak, is there any need for something new anymore?

>>15293292
any proposed solutions? whether you like it or not they are the future.

All zoomers are trannies

>>15300156
We blow up the internet.

>>15300156
>any proposed solutions?
Yes.

>>15299964
>>15299712
Gen X: Painful irony and bad sarcasm.
Zoomers: Shitty clowns.

>>15299712
>>15299964
Weak.

>>15293311
I'm starting to lose my cool when it comes to discussing the obvious decline of our civilization. The go-to response you get whenever you try to point out the cracks is a spiel about how generational tensions have been around forever, therefor concerns for the future are never reliable. They point to scares about comic books and Elvis Presley as if this somehow dismisses a scientifically quantifiable decline in critical thinking and the basic fucking ability to not be a retarded, hollowed-out puppet. They point to boomers and their narrow access to mass media being tricked into believing retarded shit and see no issue with comparing that to zoomers having the entire world at their fingertips and still coming away the most impotent fucking retards to ever exist. These kids literally can't think, they don't even live in reality anymore, and we aren't willing to talk about it.

>>15300307
Have you read H.G Well "Time Machine"? Literally that

>>15300307
Is there a name for this fallacy? "Similar things have happened before so this time it's not a big deal?"

does the Zoomer generation refute Harold Bloom's theory of anxiety of influence? most Zoomers don't have anyone they could call an intellectual hero (Peterson or some e-celeb don't count) therefore if they ever enter the literary business they won't have any influences to be anxious about. I think the following will happen:
>as predicted, mass media and the Internet dumb the entire population down to the level of passive consoomers of content, making them forget all that came before them and disregard all literary influences
>few zoomers will start writing things that will initially seem crude but will soon be accepted as a breath of fresh air in the world where every work of literature is a derivative of some other work
>the snake eats its tail and we start again, in 1000 years people on /neolit/ will be memed to "start with the Zoomers" kind of like we meme newcomers into "starting with the Greeks"