{"id":2272,"date":"2012-12-29T21:07:27","date_gmt":"2012-12-30T04:07:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=2272"},"modified":"2012-12-29T21:49:30","modified_gmt":"2012-12-30T04:49:30","slug":"from-counterculture-to-anticulture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=2272","title":{"rendered":"From counterculture to anticulture"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From his Northern California perch, tech publisher Tim O&#8217;Reilly <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/business\/2012\/12\/mf-tim-oreilly-qa\/all\/\">twitters<\/a> about the future of books:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I don\u2019t really give a shit if literary novels go away. They\u2019re an elitist pursuit. And they\u2019re relatively recent. The most popular author in the 1850s in the US wasn\u2019t Herman Melville writing\u00a0<em>Moby-Dick<\/em>, you know, or Nathaniel Hawthorne writing\u00a0<em>The House of the Seven Gables.<\/em>\u00a0It was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writing long narrative poems that were meant to be read aloud. So the novel as we know it today is only a 200-year-old construct. And now we\u2019re getting new forms of entertainment, new forms of popular culture.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is so foolish and confused, so callous. It takes a remarkable degree of critical vacuity to suggest that because an art form is &#8220;relatively recent,&#8221; it lacks worth \u2014 that because the novel is &#8220;only a 200-year-old [sic] construct,&#8221; it&#8217;s somehow suspect, and disposable. And how sad and shallow to view the reading (or writing) of a book like <em>Moby Dick<\/em> as an exercise in elitism. It&#8217;s the antithesis of elitism.<\/p>\n<p>Later in the interview, O&#8217;Reilly muses, &#8220;I think people in Silicon Valley don\u2019t realize what a bubble they\u2019re living in.&#8221; You can say that again, Tim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From his Northern California perch, tech publisher Tim O&#8217;Reilly twitters about the future of books: I don\u2019t really give a shit if literary novels go away. They\u2019re an elitist pursuit. And they\u2019re relatively recent. The most popular author in the 1850s in the US wasn\u2019t Herman Melville writing\u00a0Moby-Dick, you know, or Nathaniel Hawthorne writing\u00a0The House [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2272"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2274,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2272\/revisions\/2274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}