Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

I find this text by famous American writer Bruce Sterling very important and interesting. The text was pablished on wired 20 May
1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

3. Intellectual property systems failing.

4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.

5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.

6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.

7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.

10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.

11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.

12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.

13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.

14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own hybrid creole image.

15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.

16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.

17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

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Albert Camus Quotes

Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne…Oh no! It’s a…long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.

The aim of art, the aim of a life, can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.

Integrity has no need of rules.

Freedom is not a gift received from the State or leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.

Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.

How many crimes are permitted simply because their authors could not endure being wrong.

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.

Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom.

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