Culture Diet

In this article, Charlie Brooker talks about the superfluity of literature and entertainment he possesses. And I agree:

"I'm fairly certain I recently passed a rather pathetic tipping point, and now own more unread books and unwatched DVDs than my remaining lifespan will be able to sustain. I can't possibly read all these pages, watch all these movies, before the grim reaper comes knocking. The bastard things are going to outlive me. It's not fair. They can't even breathe."

I have bought 8 new books since the beginning of summer, and I've only read three. And two of them weren't one of the books that I bought.

Summer and Fall Conferences for RUF are a struggle for me: they've got a table of a whole dang lot of literature that I'd like to pick up, and poor little me with the knowledge I have a growing heap of unread-ness on my shelf at home.

About Crime & Punishment, Brooker says, after buying it, "I never read it. A few months ago, having forgotten I already owned a copy, I bought it again. This means I haven't read it twice." While I have yet to do that, it's only a matter of time. I have had someone tell me that I could borrow a book of theirs that I want to read, but instead I go and buy my own copy to not read.

Brooker's idea of the perfect solution for said problem is to obtain a fantastical sort of environment furbished with the technology available around the 1970s. "And every time I think about complaining," he writes "I want a minotaur to punch me in the kidneys and remind me how it was before."

While I cannot deny the comedy in that last statement, I don't know if that is the solution I would prefer. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of times when I wish we just lived in a period where life was...simpler.

Unfortunately, culture is such that once you've had a taste, you will only with great difficulty be able to refrain again forever.

Take the illegal downloading of music: if it had not become so readily available and widespread so quickly, then it would have been fairly easily to implement a system to prevent it.

Now, however, because the world has experienced it, there's no way in hell they're going to let it go. The same could be said for social networking, for iPods, modern art, pornography, et cetera.

That's what I think, but what do you think?

[from The Guardian via Curator]