I haven’t and likely won’t read the linked article – I just don’t care enough about fashion to read even a sentence about it – but fashion is clearly different now than in 1992. Hell, just watch Friends reruns for culture shock in terms of how different the clothes were in the 90s.
There are a number of Conventional Wisdoms that have been proven wrong (or at least have been subjected to analysis that provide strong evidence that they are wrong). One CW that many still cling to, for example, is that “venting anger purges it from your system.” Here are a few hundred studies from reputable sources that show this CW to be completely mistaken:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q="Does+Venting+Anger+Feed+or+Extinguish"&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=0uVwVf6jF8jRsAWguoGgCQ&ved=0CB0QgQMwAA
But if one questions that particular CW, one will often meet with intensely emotional backlash. So it is, in general, when any Conventional Wisdom is questioned. We humans like our beliefs and will go to amazing lengths to uphold and enshrine them, free of all pesky evidence that might contradict them. (See also: motivated reasoning and cognitive dissonance.)
The Conventional Wisdom that “nothing ever changes; it was the same millennia ago as now” is just as emotion-laden as is any other (as can be seen in the post to which I reply). Objections to questioning the Nothing Ever Changes CW can be counted upon to be vehement; the objections seem, often, to be taken as personal affronts.
Objections frequently contain elements such as:
[ul]
[li]a claim that the person hypothesizing an actual Change is a tall poppy who needs cutting down (or, as in the post replied to, a special snowflake who ‘thinks he-or-she is so smart!!!1!!!’) [/li]
[li]a claim that the person hypothesizing an actual Change is ignorant, and simply fails to realize that Nothing Ever Changes[/li]
[li]a claim that the person hypothesizing an actual Change knows perfectly well that Nothing Ever Changes, but is simply stating their hypothesis to troll (stir up emotion)[/li][/ul]
Many people get genuine pleasure from being in the one-up position of telling the Hypothesizer (that Phenomenon X has Changed) that they are being silly/stupid/pretentious— ‘it’s always been the same, there is no Change!’ In the rush to enjoy this pleasure, though, they may be neglecting to look at evidence that the Change is real.
Common sense can come to our rescue, here: some parts of the human experience really don’t change, but some parts really do change. To claim that the average person living in (say) England in 2015 has the same day-to-day exposure to stories that the average person living in England in 1315 had, is absurd…but posters will happily claim this absurdity as Truth, on the basis of wanting to deny that one person could possibly have noticed something that they themselves have failed to notice.
In short: if the OP’s observations have actual merit, that fact doesn’t take anything away from anyone reading the OP’s thread. It really doesn’t.
The misconception that this is the OP’s hypothesis has already been dealt with by the OP.
It’s at least more plausible.
The idea that we won’t run out of stories, but instead will just get tired of stories because there’s so many of them, then maybe gravitate to pure sensory or emotional or whatever experiences is ludicrous on its face.
Experiential like drugs? Because somehow drugs don’t already exist?
Telling and hearing stories is a fundamental aspect of human nature. We won’t just abandon stories any more than we’ll abandon porn.
That’s actually an apt analogy. Substitute porn for stories in the thread’s premise and it holds together pretty well. We have more access to porn now than at any time in human history. Therefore of course we’re special snowflakes who will no longer have any need or desire for porn. Because we evolved or something.
It’s patently absurd. (The stories version, the one in the OP. Not the porn one, though that’s also absurd.)
EDIT: Or if porn is too low-brow, or you think it’s more driven by biology than storytelling is, substitute art. We’re never going to get tired of art due to its ubiquity, just like we’re never going to get tired of stories due to their ubiquity.
NM
I completely agree with you that it’s absurd to think that humans would get tired of stories. (Though I don’t think that the OP has been arguing that.)
One particular individual, however, can (hypothetically) tire of stories. Or at least of the stories being thrust at him-or-her.
Thanks. I think the resistance we’ve seen in this thread to the idea is due to several things:
• We all have a need for entertainment, though that need can take several forms. Clearly that need won’t go away. There is a strong association in our society right now between entertainment and fictional stories produced by the Establishment, whether that be novels processed by gatekeeper publishing houses or movies/TV shows produced by large production companies. In contrast, in say 1620 in London, Story mostly took the form of sitting in the coffee house or pub and talking about real life. Gossiping, that kind of thing. With the rise of the Internet, I think we are going back to that more human-scale, participatory storytelling, albeit on a global scale this time. We see that with people having fun with memes, making YouTube prank/challenge videos, or just talking about their lives on Facebook.
In any case, I think there is some confusion between this need to share stories that is intrinsic to human nature and the ability/need/desire to consume the literary and visual fiction that has arisen since the late 1700s.
• Creative people are not going to like the idea I’ve presented, since we all want people to get into our stuff. I’m no different. I’m a songwriter and published writer. I’ve written four plays that were performed in community theater in NYC. I’d love there to be a low supply of content and infinite demand. I’ve love to make millions and be famous. I’m not going to stop creating. I know at the same time, however, that there are lots of talented people and content is in vast oversupply right now.
See the first bullet point in my post above.
We as a society can and do get tired and drop or at least purchase less entire art forms:
• We essentially closed the canon on classical music. We are content to stick to Beethoven and other big names, mostly from the 19th century, when it comes to symphonies, and the amount of attention we give to classical music has also gone down significantly.
• A similar thing has happened to poetry.
• A similar thing has happened to the straight play, though one could argue that it has been supplanted by the movie and TV show.
• The movie industry was in dire straits in the 1950s with the rise of TV. There was even a campaign put out by the industry: “Movies, better than ever!” Right now, the economics of the movie industry are very shaky. I don’t think they are going away, however, but the movie industry right now is based not on telling great stories but on brokering expensive visual spectacle and expensive star power. The whole remake/sequel/prequel trend is based on selling a familiar story but “done better” or “updated for today.”
• The value of the music industry has plummeted catastrophically. The total global revenue of the industry was $20.7 billion in 2005 and $14.97 billion in 2014. This at a time when social media was exploding and countries like China and India were getting richer. By the way, as I’m sure you know, $15 billion is nothing when it comes to global trade. Sure, downloading has hurt the industry significantly, but that is just us being cheap as a species when it comes to purchasing music. Cite: Music industry - Wikipedia
Now you can argue that our music consumption has remained the same or even increased per capita (my guess is less, since there is only so much time in the day, and video games, YouTube videos, etc., have surely supplanted some music consumption. But I don’t have a cite.). But that doesn’t hurt my argument, since this situation will and already is result in less new music being produced and getting out there, resulting in the stagnation of the medium (as a business; I am not of the opinion that music sucks today). Which is what this whole thread is about. We are not going to stop consuming stories. We are not going to stop consuming music. But we could collectively as a society consume them less and we could process a lot less new material. If the current trend continues, the Long Tail and bad economics could turn making music into a similar activity to writing poetry: something you do as a hobby with no hope of getting major recognition for.
That is a point in my favor, not yours. First, the economics of porn are also terrible right now. Pretty much all you could ever want is available free online.
Further, widely available porn is also something very recent. The ability to walk into a store and buy a skin mag with actual skin in it didn’t exist until the 1950s. So we simply don’t know how the human species will relate to widely available (and now free) porn over the long term. We are also now seeing the very first generation of kids growing up with free porn on the Internet, which parents have a hard time controlling, to say the least. We simply don’t know what’s going to happen.
In my day, you had to hide skin mags and video tapes in the house. I simply didn’t bother and rarely saw any porn as a teen. Had free porn existed online, I absolutely would have been all over it. I read one article on Salon written by a young guy who grew up with online porn, and it was very damaging to him. Not because porn is “bad” but because it was indeed an oversaturation situation to him, and he found it hard to get excited with a real person because his ability to get turned on was calibrated to extreme porn.
To give the food example again, some combination of more easily accessible food or new food (probably also decreased smoking) resulted in a huge increase in obesity in the 20th century, and if you’re in your 40s like me or older, these changes happened right before your eyes. New technologies can result in new societal trends, and it can happen very quickly.
I’m not sure if I would describe that as internet conventional wisdom. Maybe in some circles. Mostly I notice people expressing surprise at how old certain ideas or conventions are, or they’re sad when they find out a movie they like is copying something that came way before.
What would you peg as the last original story? Or type of story.
I know that’s incredibly subjective, and you could get into splitter/lumper territory, but I’m curious.
I tend to be a lumper. An example of my thought process:
Inception ripped off The Matrix, which ripped off Ghost in the Shell, which ripped off Blade Runner, which was based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which…I’m not familiar enough with sci-fi history to trace it back further. But I know it wasn’t the first dystopian future with robots.
These technological elements are clothing of the underlying themes and characters. Wondering about the future, the nature of mankind and its point in the universe, humans creating artificial life and becoming as gods, is reality real and how would we know – ancient stuff. That might be too reductionist though. I don’t want to be one of those people saying there’s only five stories or whatever (man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. himself, and so on).
Sometimes I think finding an original story is like identifying a biological species. They run together too much.
Christ, no. What has reached us is only a tiny % of a tiny % of the stuff people came up with. People make up stories all the time, modify them, adapt them to the audience… watching a movie takes 2 hours; reading the book usually takes longer; explaining it out loud around a campfire, or to a child you’re putting to bed, again takes longer.
And every story is a journey story.
This is for the most part not true at all. Firstly, classical music has always been a minority interest, with the arguable exception of church music such as that written by Bach. Secondly, the canon extends much further than that, well into the middle of the 20th century at least, with Shostakovich being the first name that comes to mind who wrote major pieces after 1950 that are regularly performed and recognised, although there are many others.
Also, any day of the week I could put the radio on and listen to new works (BBC Radio 3, if you care), and I’d guess at least on a weekly basis I could find modern chamber music, at least, being performed near me, and most programs of symphonic work include at least one new work. These events and orchestras are funded both by the government, and by private individuals and businesses who choose to do so for whatever reason - whether a belief in the art or a desire for publicity.
That’s ignoring the vast amount of orchestral music composed for film soundtracks, some of which is of extremely high quality.
I could write a similar post about drama, living in a smallish city with (at least) 5 theatres, and many amateur productions as well, often of newly written works.
I said we had closed the canon, not that new works were never performed. And I said “mostly from the 19th century.” Mostly.
I saw a new work performed recently at the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. It was terrible. But I am, for example, a big Elliot Carter fan. He’s someone recent (well, he was over 100 when he died a few years ago, but still :)) whose string quartets have gotten recognition as masterpieces and will likely continue to be played. But such cases are pretty rare.
My thesis is not that nothing original is ever done any more. And originality can be a multilevel affair. For example, you could have cliche characters but an original plot.
What I am talking about as dangerous to pop culture, so to speak, is a bit different. For example, you have the issue of “stakes” in plotting a movie. All of the superhero movies now are about threats of ultimate destruction: the world will end unless we do something. At some point in time, stakes on that level were impressive. It gave real power to the story. Now it is completely worn out and has no power at all.
Let’s take a counter example. In some of Tarantino’s movies, one character is about to get killed, or a cop’s ear is about to get cut off. And he generates genuine tension IMO with those theoretically lower stakes (at times, when he does it right). But that is hard to pull off, and if it were done well enough by enough people, that might lose its power as well. Certainly, the threat of a character dying in a movie is rarely all that exciting.
Plot twists are another thing. I’m sure the first plot twist in a thriller was quite thrilling. Now they are just expected in a thriller. They are hard to do well, and most of the time it’s just a “meh.”
So global originality in terms of ideas isn’t the only issue. The parts and pieces can get worn out too, in essence for good.
Someone already has!
I know I’m getting tired of this story about how awful the Garfield comic is. You people might better understand how profound Garfield is if you were better educated in the great stories of our species existential understanding of how evolution and the Great Why have shaped our need for understanding of why we have the need to feel peanut butter between our toes.
Music consumption is the highest that has ever been in history. Period. The revenues of the music business may be trending downward, although even that is hard to substantiate if you bother to follow the links to International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s (IFPI) report that your link is taken from.In any case, revenues are no longer linked to consumption. Consumption is unbelievably high.
Psy’s “Gangnam Style” alone has 2,348,804,967 views on YouTube. There is nothing comparable in the history of music.
Of course we could. Every single piece of evidence we have says we will not. You are consistently conflating the decline in particular forms with an overall decline of entertainment consumption. New technologies are increasing consumption rather than decreasing it.
The only barrier is the 1440 minutes in a day. I have little doubt that implanted devices will make that a reasonable target so that entertainment input would be a constant background to all other activity. That’s the time to start the serious conversation on overabundance.
I know. I was interested in what Sherrerd had to say because he seemed to have strong opinions on original stories. Might be a hijack.
I’m guessing real orchestra heads would look down on it as pop pablum, but I like listening to Two Steps from Hell, Audiomachine, Immediate Music, Position Music, and a slew of others. It’s alive to me.
My thinking on this isn’t far off from yours. But in answer to the bit I put in red:
My first thought on reading this question about original stories, was of the research I did for my book Grey Fairy/White Wolf. I didn’t post an answer right away because I wasn’t entirely sure of the restrictions we may face here on mentioning such things; I did some reading around the TOS and so on and believe this post is okay. But if not, I will understand if it must be deleted or edited.
Anyway: The impetus for the book had been the observation that of the 19th century flood of many, many hundreds of fairy tales—even just in English (originals or translations)—only a tiny fraction are known to most of us, today. By my count there are about thirty that most English speakers would recognize enough to be able to describe. For every book of fairy tales published in English over the past couple of centuries, there are perhaps one or two that most of us could retell (at least in outline), and dozens that we would never have heard of.
The unfamiliar stories tend to have some elements in common with the household-name ones. But the unknown stories lack the satisfactions offered by the familiar ones—Cinderella, Snow White, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, Goldilocks, Rapunzel, etc. The established stories get retold again and again, though many adaptations. The unfamiliar stories are ignored. Why? The unfamiliar fairy tales are just as free of copyright as are the well-known ones; they, too, contain magic, princes and princesses, quests, adventures, discoveries of wealth, wronged innocents, fear, danger, and villains getting their Just Deserts.
Yet they haven’t caught on. They don’t have what people want. They’re there for the taking—but there are no takers. (Well, not quite: my book is based on “repairing” three of the flawed stories. I discuss this process in my Marketplace Folder thread about the book. I won’t link, as I suspect that might be going ‘over the line’ of what’s allowed here.)
My point is that massive numbers of original stories may be written—but only a tiny fraction of them will catch on. And those that catch on, DO have qualities that the fallen-by-the-wayside stories lack.
Once such stories appear, they tend to be pounced upon and re-worked in “homages” that may be more or less gracious about acknowledging the original. If Ambrose Bierce had received a penny for each time the (so far as I can tell) original idea expressed in his “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” has been re-used by someone else, he would have been the richest man on the face of the earth at the time of his death. (Possibly in 1914; his end is mysterious.)
Original ideas do still show up, and we know them by how quickly they reappear under other bylines. As we all know, the works of Philip K. Dick have been widely mined. Richard Matheson is another recent author who came up with ideas still being recycled today; there are others.
My final point is that I agree with the OP that the inundation of stories we experience today IS something new under the sun, and is and will affect us in ways we may not yet suspect. But I may–I’m not sure I’ve understood completely–disagree with the OP that this necessarily means a change in the number of original story ideas (either of plot or character) that may arise.
It’s all kind of subjective. But fascinating!
Step back away from the TV and find another hobby.
I didn’t definitively say that per capita music consumption was down, simply that it was likely given that playing video games has likely eaten into time spent listening purely to music.
I’m sure that total global music consumption (whether free or not) is up based on the higher population and increasing wealth in the developing world. I should have been clear that I meant per capita consumption, and I was thinking about the developed world. Anyhow, I didn’t intent to present a confident thesis to that effect. Sidebar.
Nope. I was originally talking about fiction-based entertainment, and that’s where most of my confidence lies. I agree that entertainment consumption overall is on the rise, but that includes video games, everything.
“You talking to me? I’m the only one here.” I already said I watch barely any TV. But you probably didn’t read much in this thread.
Interesting. What do you think those qualities are?
Great point about this story. It’s the foundation of many a Twilight Zone-y tale. 
I’m not sure we disagree. Right now one can read an infinite amount of fanfic and other free fiction online. If all goes right in the world (doubtful) and we end up having to work a lot less and have a lot more leisure time (someday, no doubt), then people will probably produce more such fic. Production is theoretically virtually limitless.
But how much will people consume? What will be the rewards to the producers?
For example, there is probably more poetry produced today than ever before, but consumption is abysmal, and the rewards are basically zero. In fact, I’d say consumption is so low now that poetry probably can’t wear out its tropes and techniques any further. People just don’t encounter them and just don’t care.
We could reach the same stage with story. No, consumption will not reach zero. But we could reach a point like this: In 2015, the McGuffin-based, world-destruction-threatening, CGI-laden Marvel movies sold well, but in 2045 they don’t because we have collectively become sick of that kind of movie. And so on for various types of movie until creating a tentpole movie that really draws people in is quite tough.
As an example, the straight-up Sleepless in Seattle-type romcom really seems out of fashion right now, or perhaps we have gotten sick of it, collectively. Not sure.
Thanks! I appreciate your observations.