altivo

Good thing it's a short week. On the other hoof, the reason I need it to be a short week is because today had two day's worth of work to do in one day. Somehow the tradeoff doesn't seem worth it. And on top of that, tomorrow is Wednesday.

I wanna go to bed now, but if I do I'll wake up at 3 am. No good.

Oddly enough, my rather amateurish artwork is now getting faved at SoFurry, where my high quality stories are ignored. The art is no more pr0n than the stories are. Hard to figure.

Yawn~~ C'mon, gotta stay awake and do some laundry at least. I'm nearly out of clean socks. ;p

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: Frozen oak grove

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

feathertail

Artwork gets more of a response than stories do, sadly. >.>

I'd like to figure out why this is.

From:

altivo

I have a theory, but it isn't pretty. My observation is that literacy is seriously on the decline here in the US. More and more people view reading, any kind of reading at all, as a major effort that isn't worth the bother. Several studies have shown that reading for pleasure (as opposed to for work or school) is so much in decline that less than half the adult population do it AT ALL. It's so much easier to turn into a vegetable in front of the television...

Schnee also pointed out over on LJ that reading even a short piece takes longer than glancing at a picture does. Of course, seeing the picture in detail does take more time than that, but most viewers probably do little more than glance.

From:

merik.livejournal.com

Somehow the tradeoff doesn't seem worth it.

That seems to be the same conundrum I have after a day off from work - an rest from the day off gets wiped out by the extra energy expenditure required to get caught up at work. :-P

where my high quality stories are ignored

While I think your art is nice, I did want to compliment you on A Close Port of Call, which I finally read on FurRag last week. Very nice furry science fiction with a sweet ending, which made it quite an enjoyable story to read.

From:

altivo.livejournal.com

Thanks. If you liked that, you might also like "Catch Me if You Can" or "A Change of Pace."

From:

schnee.livejournal.com

Oddly enough, my rather amateurish artwork is now getting faved at SoFurry, where my high quality stories are ignored. The art is no more pr0n than the stories are. Hard to figure.

Reading a story will most likely take a couple of minutes, at least, and require the user to wind down, relax, focus only on the story and get into the proper mindset. Viewing a picture takes a few seconds and can be done even while you're busy, stressed, and multitasking.

From:

altivo.livejournal.com

That's probably part of it all right. I also think that people are reading so much less these days that their reading abilities decline. many of them seem to view any kind of reading as "too much effort."

From:

schnee.livejournal.com

Perhaps (although I'm honestly not sure that people are really reading *less* these days — i.e., that they used to read more in the past, on average), but I still think that people not being willing to "get into" something unless they have reason to believe it's gonna be worth it also plays a role.

It's certainly something that's true for me, and not just for stories; considering Youtube videos, for example, I often don't watch the ones that people post, simply because I often have no reason to believe it's gonna be worthwhile spending five minutes of my life on something, and because even though five minutes wouldn't be so bad, when there's several videos every day, it does add up quickly.

Stories are also similar. I tend not to read those, I admit; it's an investment of a significant amount of time, and I'm often just not willing to invest much time, especially when I don't have some reason to suspect that the writing will be good and appeal to me. (Which is not intended to be veiled criticism of anyone's writing, BTW, especially not yours.)

I think it's probably similar for many others, too.

From:

altivo.livejournal.com

I skip the videos too. When I bother to take the time they invariably turn out to be not worth the bother. I can't figure out what people see in them really. Most are just pointless.

The "not enough time" syndrome, though, is overall something I can't figure out. People say they don't have time to cook, to eat properly, to sleep, or, in fact, to do anything. Yet somehow they are using up 24 hours a day the same as ever. Now what did they use it on? In this online milieu, it seems that many use a huge percentage of their time playing video games. One could even conclude that video games are more important to them than eating or sleeping. This seems like a very misplace priority to me.

Aside from that, television seems to be the reason that people have no time for other things. They just have to see this, and this, and this. Or cruise through youtube to make sure they haven't missed anything new. I fear we are living in the era of "dumbing down" everything.

From:

schnee.livejournal.com

Hmm, I don't think no video's worth the bother. That said, I'm more interested in accurate labelling, anyway: if somebody says "here's a ten minute video of my cat", I can and will conclude that this video is not going to be any different from every single other such video out there (and that the cat, for that matter, isn't different from every single other cat out there, either), so I can just decide not to watch it, and everything's fine.

It's situations where people just say "OMG this is so cool look at this" that bother me. How am I supposed to tell if it's worth investing my time that way? I usually default to "no, I'm not gonna watch that", or perhaps "I'll watch the first 10/15/20 seconds, and if there's no indication it'll be worthwhile by then, I'll skip it", but while that's probably as good as you can get under these circumstances, it's not ideal.

Yeah, of course the day still has just 24 hours, but I think what people are trying to do, consciously or not, is to maximize what they get out of it: the most bang for the buck, as it were, in terms of entertainment/fun/general benefit. Somebody might say "I could spend an hour cooking a nice meal, or I could spend five minutes microwaving something and 55 minutes playing this game/watching this movie/reading this book", and then conclude that the total benefit or pay-off or whatever you want to call it is larger in the second case: the decrease in quality of your food is more than made up for by the increase in fun, at least in that person's own personal metric.

Of course, it might just as well be that people think this is true even when it really isn't. Generally speaking, reality isn't context-free; for example, you might well be playing a video game and not enjoying it (that much) right now but still do it because you know (or expect, or hope) you'll get to more enjoyable parts again later on. But on the other hand, this is something that can be exploited, too, and it takes some experience to recognize and avoid time sinks.

But apart from that, I think there's nothing wrong with different people having different priorities and enjoying different things, and I don't think it's justified to look down on people who, say, prefer playing video to reading, or who generally have different priorities. It may well be that they lack the insight to realize that their priorities are messed up, but it also may well be that their priorities are genuinely different, something that's neither good nor bad in itself.