Caleb Crain uses “The Sopranos” and “To Each His Own”, to compare people reading or watching the show/movie. The viewer and reader both entertain themselves by being educated about the mafia while putting their focus on what they are doing. Sociologist hypothesis that reading will be for pleasure and not just forced on them, reading and writing will not be lost. They alert that it probably won't recover the eminence of limitation; it may just transform into “an increasingly arcane hobby." The world has shifted so much that it has changed the disposition of civilization. Watching television is put before reading a book for many people. Readers and viewers have different perspectives of the world because of the way they think. If the dominating
To begin with, the narrator provides research and graphs to show how people feel as they watch different shows. Furthermore, she gets into other research about television, except this time about interests, for instance, inspiration state and moral ambiguity state, comfort, social commentary, and irrelevance, and fantasy and imagination.
A life of organized crime, fancy cars, machine guns, beautiful women, money, power and family; these are the images that have perpetuated the associations of Italian-Americans with the Mafia in film and television for decades. It is in this traditional Godfather fashion that the HBO hit series The Sopranos continues to perpetuate this stereotypical image into the 21st century. From classic films like The Godfather and Goodfellas, to miniseries events like Bella Mafia and The Last Don, to the dramatic series The Sopranos, Italian-Americans have traditionally been portrayed as gangsters and mobsters and have been seen living the lives of organized criminals. Italian-Americans and the Mafia have traditionally been linked in popular culture and The Sopranos is no exception.
In a world dominated by technology, reading novels has become dull. Instead of immersing into books, we choose to listen to Justin Bieber’s new songs and to scroll through Instagram posts. We have come to completely neglect the simple pleasures of flipping through pages and getting to finally finish a story. Sherman Alexie and Stephan King’s essays attempt to revive this interest in books that has long been lost. They remind us of the important role that reading plays in our daily lives. “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me,” for instance, demonstrates how being literate saved the narrator from the oppressive nature of society. The author explains that even though he was capable of reading complex books at an astonishingly young
Knowladge is the key to a happy and succsesfull life. Dana Gioia create a feeling in this exerpt by say if people don’t read they wont be succsesfull. She uses good diction to get across her point. Also corrolates how decrease in literary reading afects political and historical awarness, and how it effects the work place. Therefore Dana utalizes her logic behind effects of the decrease and uses good word chioce to prove her point.
In the article, “Why Literature Matters” by Dana Gioia, Gioia argues that young Americans show a decreased interest in the arts—especially literature—and this severe decline will lead to considerable consequences. She believes that this drop in interest will lead to less historical and political awareness, which in turn will make the nation less informed, active, and independent-minded. Gioia convinces us of the importance of literature through her use of credibility, appeals to fear, and specific examples.
Dana Gioia builds and argument about how the decline of reading will effect America by ethos such as outside information, magazines and uses logos to help show the reader that a decline is happening.
To persuade the audience and prove that the number of readers is, in fact, declining, the author reinforces the idea in the first four paragraphs by providing data from research and surveys conducted by trusted sources such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the US Bureau of the Census, which found out in a 2002 study that there is a worrisome "declining percentage of Americans, especially young adults, reading literature." Once they have a confirmation of the data by credible sources, the readers are now more inclined to believe and listen
There is no doubt, that literature has taken a back seat in the digital age. In a 2013 article for the Wall Street Journal, a top store executive for Barnes and Nobles revealed that the company expects to close twenty stores a year over the next decade. But Barnes and Nobles isn’t alone. Bookstore chains across the country are suffering the same losses. Consumers are choosing online book retailers like Amazon or opting out of reading altogether. These recent [trends?] are evident of a startling reality: people don’t read anymore.
In “The Closing of the American Book,” published in the New York Times Magazine, Andrew Solomon argues about how the decline of literary reading is a crisis in national health, politics, and education. Solomon relates the decline of reading with the rise of electronic media. He believes that watching television and sitting in front of a computer or a video screen instead of reading can cause the human brain to turn off, and lead to loneliness and depression. He also argues that with the decrease of reading rates, there will no longer be weapons against “absolutism” and “terrorism,” leading to the United States political failure in these battles. The last point Solomon makes is that there is no purpose behind America being one of the most literate societies in history if people eradicate this literacy, and so he encourages everyone to help the society by increasing reading rates and making it a “mainstay of community.” Solomon tries to show the importance of reading in brain development and he encourages people to read more by emphasizing the crisis and dangers behind the declination of reading.
In today's society, many young adults find entertainment and freedom in the form of literature. Not the horribly dry and slow writings that our preceding generations found enjoyment in, but instead a new strain of literature. It can be easily observed that book's themes have often changed to better accommodate the current generation growing up, and this principle can easily be applied to the books of modern society. An example of the evolution of books over time is that today books have changed from being a one hit wonder, too a series spread over several years. Some of the modern-day texts that are popular amount the younger generation include series such as The Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner, Twilight, and Harry Potter. Despite the changing format of books, they still have the same goal of trying to teach us important lessons and skills to be applied during our lifetimes. Modern literature often times is what highlights the most important and influential characteristics affecting our society.
“Stop watching television and go do something productive!” My mother would shout angrily when I would watch the “The Simpsons.” As mentioned in the article "Watching TV Makes You Smarter," Steven Johnson argued that 21st Century television shows develop complicated and more challenging narratives than those of an earlier time and offer viewers extra intellectual stimulation. Consequently television programming today reveals an astonishing narrative sophistication with unique plots increasing the viewer’s intellectual demands. In addition Johnson mentions that the sleeper curve in today’s television programming drives the viewer to pay attention, make connections, and keep track of the characters relationships. Moreover multithreading of many plot lines was different in the past. When shows followed only one or two lead characters; nevertheless now even in a show like ''Apprentice'' our mind connects with the emotions of not one but many characters. Now the viewers search the characters faces and the narrative weaves a collection of distinct subplots that are joined to decide the conclusion of the show. What is interesting to me is multithreading, flashing arrows, and social networking are now included in most television programming suggesting that it has gotten more cognitively demanding through the questioning of arguments, analysis of characters, narrative structure, and inferences. I agree with Johnson that television provides intellectual stimulation making viewers smarter. That’s why if my mother and I had known at an earlier time the intellectual benefits of television, we would have had a positive approach about watching television.
... to be true, we are now living in a world with full of spectacles and clearly people are interested and responsive to it, there is somehow a mental paradigm shift of thinking which we depend more on our intuition rather intellect. However, The Wire brings up the argument that image culture does not necessarily deprive people’s ability to think, but somehow encourage people to think more actively. After examine both novels, I think Posner’s arguments can only be partially right, people are mesmerized by spectacles, but at least people’s inner ability to think still exist. Despite all the facts that The Wire is unpopular and infamous, it’s still one of the most demanding and thoughtful TV series of all time, which means most of the people are still think rationally. So far, there are some concerns about image culture, but I think overall those concerns can be fixed.
What will most people be reading in a generation? The distractions every day people face in today 's society are affecting current levels of literacy. The direction we need to be pushed towards will be the top priority of the 21st-century educators. In her essay "Read with Purpose" by Cheryl Barnett-Bey, she proposes that the enjoyment of reading has been replaced by the Internet and television. Just before my teenage years I was introduced to new technology and became less interested in reading books. Throughout my own literacy journey I 've noticed our fast-paced society is slowly turning more and more people into being interested in activities than reading.
The main form of literature, the book, has had a great impact upon the formation of our society today. Before the 1940’s TV had not come into being yet and there was not much else to do other than read books. Thus books formed my grandparents and to some extent my parents and, although I grew up in the generation of TV, books as literature have indirectly formed me as well.
...wan believes, one of the best things about our digital lives is the ease with which we can share ideas with others. It is now possible for readers to connect with each other worldwide, as well as recommend and share their opinions about a particular piece of literature. Our need to engage in “deep reading” will not go away, as Rosen believes. The act of how we read may evolve as it has been evolving since beginning of mankind. How we read and write has evolved from cave walls to stone tablets to paper to keyboards. The digital world will not change what we read, but how we read. Because the experience of reading, the love of narrative, and cravings for story-telling is instilled into our DNA. Reading is a basic human need, it is evolutionary. Even though our means of attaining information or story telling may change, the act of reading is literally forever-lasting.