Why are people focusing on the numerical comparison between writers and billionaires? Whatever, it doesn’t really matter.
The point of the article is that writers and authors are seemingly less valued than they ever have been. One reason for this is probably the change in media consumption habits which renders writers mere employees and underlings in the film and television industries (along with everywhere else). People no longer read books, which are the main format by which writers can become self-employed and self sufficient.
As always, it comes back to the homogenizing aspect of capitalism which tends to absorb everything into an interconnected web of economic dependencies. Instead of small businesses, we have overarching retail behemoths like Walmart and Amazon. Similarly, instead of a multitude of independent writers and authors expressing their own thoughts in books, they are compelled to work in teams to construct artificial, corporatized narratives due to economic necessity, yielding film franchises and television series along with all of their advertising and merchandising income.
Yeah. I mean the article could be right or wrong, although it seems to me at first glance to be plausible + relevant. But the number of people coming out to just purely jeer at the conclusions like “FUK U THERES PLENTY OF WRITERS THIS DUDE IS RONG, CITATION: MY DICK” – no real attempt to disagree with anything he’s saying other than that they don’t like it – is distressing to me.
Eh it’s fine, everyone on the internet likes to take the opportunity to correct an argument that they think is wrong, even if just on a technicality. I don’t think the author of this piece needed to focus so much on the numerical comparison with billionaires either. If anything, they could have focused more on the historical compensation of writers to make a more compelling argument. Maybe try to find book sales and compensation from the past few centuries and see how they compare.
Yeah, I get that, I think that’s probably more why it’s provoking resistance; he phrased it deliberately provocatively and wound up excluding some avenues that still produce books and people making a living (like working as an academic / teacher and also doing writing). It just kinda irritated me like, hey, I can draw a really strong and surprising conclusion from this data, and people’s reaction “that conclusion is surprising” -> “therefore is wrong” -> “no need to look further, I figured it out for you and corrected you, that was easy next pls”
Why are people focusing on the numerical comparison between writers and billionaires? Whatever, it doesn’t really matter.
The point of the article is that writers and authors are seemingly less valued than they ever have been. One reason for this is probably the change in media consumption habits which renders writers mere employees and underlings in the film and television industries (along with everywhere else). People no longer read books, which are the main format by which writers can become self-employed and self sufficient.
As always, it comes back to the homogenizing aspect of capitalism which tends to absorb everything into an interconnected web of economic dependencies. Instead of small businesses, we have overarching retail behemoths like Walmart and Amazon. Similarly, instead of a multitude of independent writers and authors expressing their own thoughts in books, they are compelled to work in teams to construct artificial, corporatized narratives due to economic necessity, yielding film franchises and television series along with all of their advertising and merchandising income.
Yeah. I mean the article could be right or wrong, although it seems to me at first glance to be plausible + relevant. But the number of people coming out to just purely jeer at the conclusions like “FUK U THERES PLENTY OF WRITERS THIS DUDE IS RONG, CITATION: MY DICK” – no real attempt to disagree with anything he’s saying other than that they don’t like it – is distressing to me.
Eh it’s fine, everyone on the internet likes to take the opportunity to correct an argument that they think is wrong, even if just on a technicality. I don’t think the author of this piece needed to focus so much on the numerical comparison with billionaires either. If anything, they could have focused more on the historical compensation of writers to make a more compelling argument. Maybe try to find book sales and compensation from the past few centuries and see how they compare.
Yeah, I get that, I think that’s probably more why it’s provoking resistance; he phrased it deliberately provocatively and wound up excluding some avenues that still produce books and people making a living (like working as an academic / teacher and also doing writing). It just kinda irritated me like, hey, I can draw a really strong and surprising conclusion from this data, and people’s reaction “that conclusion is surprising” -> “therefore is wrong” -> “no need to look further, I figured it out for you and corrected you, that was easy next pls”
People no longer read books?
Unfortunately not. And even the few people who do still read books are much less likely to purchase a physical copy.
Well, true on the physical copy. I love my audio books and e-ink reader.