Print is Dead. One Hundred Years of Solitude is One Hour…
0 reactions
Print is Dead. One Hundred Years of Solitude is One Hour of Screen Time.
I recently got into a heated debate with some friends. One is a film guy with an impressive IMDB and the other a Professor of Cultural studies out west. The conversation left me feeling very hollow. First some hard reality.
Reading for pleasure has fallen 40% in the last decade and 40% of Americans did not read a book in 2025. The avg only finished 2. The stats get worse so I won't continue. The reality is that reading is shrinking exponentially in how much of our time it gets.
Netflix is making the 2nd part of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book One Hundred years of Solitude. I've discussed that book many times over the| years. The sentence level density of the prose , the structure. Magical Realism as a narrative technique rather than a visual style. Now people meet the Buendia family through a streaming platform first. I still) remember the night I finished that book. I wasn't right for days. It affected me deeply. Now it is an hour of screen time and a thumbnail. This isn't a fluke. 9 billion views on netflix alone were adaptations last year. People discover through the visual first and the prose involved is an afterthought. 20% of all hours watched across all platforms are adaptations. The writing itself disappeared and was replaced by conversations about vibe and fan art and graphic novels and book toks.
This is no knock on readers. 19 % of people do 82% of all reading. That means though that the readers have the literary culture on their backs while everything goes increasingly visual.
Really curious how it feels inside the community. I don't want to be an elitist or a lost old man pineing for the good old days. I just want to have the time back when a writers turn of a phrase or style could be seen in the world. Does it feel like a shrinking core. Will it just blink out one day to nothingness or has the conversation around books found a new life just in a different way. Come on folks give me some hope.
#entertainment
I recently got into a heated debate with some friends. One is a film guy with an impressive IMDB and the other a Professor of Cultural studies out west. The conversation left me feeling very hollow. First some hard reality.
Reading for pleasure has fallen 40% in the last decade and 40% of Americans did not read a book in 2025. The avg only finished 2. The stats get worse so I won't continue. The reality is that reading is shrinking exponentially in how much of our time it gets.
Netflix is making the 2nd part of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book One Hundred years of Solitude. I've discussed that book many times over the| years. The sentence level density of the prose , the structure. Magical Realism as a narrative technique rather than a visual style. Now people meet the Buendia family through a streaming platform first. I still) remember the night I finished that book. I wasn't right for days. It affected me deeply. Now it is an hour of screen time and a thumbnail. This isn't a fluke. 9 billion views on netflix alone were adaptations last year. People discover through the visual first and the prose involved is an afterthought. 20% of all hours watched across all platforms are adaptations. The writing itself disappeared and was replaced by conversations about vibe and fan art and graphic novels and book toks.
This is no knock on readers. 19 % of people do 82% of all reading. That means though that the readers have the literary culture on their backs while everything goes increasingly visual.
Really curious how it feels inside the community. I don't want to be an elitist or a lost old man pineing for the good old days. I just want to have the time back when a writers turn of a phrase or style could be seen in the world. Does it feel like a shrinking core. Will it just blink out one day to nothingness or has the conversation around books found a new life just in a different way. Come on folks give me some hope.
#entertainment
| 4,000 mlx | |
| 6 | |
| 0 |