So I recently decided to go on some nostalgia trip and started looking for communities I was involved in during my younger days and most of them I can't find anyone or anything from them. Further, I can't even find anything that looks like a continuation of whatever the topic was. Recently I saw a thread on one of the Chinese forums I frequent saying that the current generation of young adults probably never read anything from Jin Yong (a guy some believes is the Chinese Tolkien) because his books are too long and actually sort of hard to read and there isn't any illustration of scantily clad girls. In a decade we might not be able to find a topic like 'who is the strongest guys in all of Jin Yong's novels' even in Chinese forums, and that's akin to not having a "Superman vs whoever" discussion in terms of cultural impact. I saw some figures saying that if you assume only a small % of any show produced is actually good, we've reached a point where you'll still never be able to finish watching every show that was good since even good shows are being produced at a rate faster than the amount of hours in a day you have to watch it.
It seems like everything is just so fragmentized that unless you can't even find people in a particular topic unless it's something really big. Further, it seems like everyone's attention span is so short, you don't even get some well drawn out fights, whether it's politics or Nintendo versus Sony or whether your favorite character is stronger than my favorite character. In fact, this community is a pretty significant anomaly to what I know of. Let's take the politics discussion. As far as I can tell at least everyone put in stuff that they thought was what they believe as opposed to copy & paste it from somewhere. Forget whether the discussion is civil or good or legitimate at the moment. If you go to say a major news network (e.g. CNN) most of the posts can be finished in one sentence and the guys who have more than to say either copy & pasted it from somewhere or is a bot. We probably should be thankful that Russia supposedly runs Internet trolls to spread disinformation, because without them there could be considerably less source of controversy/discussion. I don't think this is an issue of people are more busy with their time or that they're less interested in repeating the same thing. At least things like politics shouldn't get old, and a true passionate fan should always be able to tell you why this game or this system or this character is totally better than the other thing.
Where do you even go to have discussion in today's Internet, let alone meaningful discussion? Anything that's not super mainstream you end up with a community of 10 guys that might post once a week if you're lucky. I guess sometimes you get lucky if there happens to be a central source for whatever you're interested in, like say Shoryuken.com for fighting fans, but in general that cannot be expected and fighting game is a rather large following anyway. It seems to me there's going to be a point where significant part of our culture is just completely lost. For example, High Score Girl is about two kids growing up in the Street Fighter 2 arcade era. Of course arcade don't exist anymore and teenagers now might very well say 'what the heck is this arcade the main characters are playing at?' Gu Long, who is generally considered second only to Jin Yong in terms of influence on modern Chinese writing, will probably only be known for cheap mobile ports that carries his name and Chinese of today's generation would be expected to know what he actually wrote. Bookstores certainly don't carry his novels in significant numbers anymore, and of course I'm not even sure how retail bookstores even survive today. In fact the entire fantasy martial arts writing genre for Chinese seems to be replaced by cheap fanfiction on the Net (I thin they call it light-novel), and yes the worst of those novels did read like fanfiction too, but it's not something so bad that can be replaced by fanfiction. Nirvana in Fire is probably the biggest light-novel and sure, I can admit that reads like the author actually has some writing ability, but it's still nowhere comparable. Are we going to enter an age where some random popular fanfic writing on the Internet becomes more well-known than Lord of the Rings? If Lord of the Rings doesn't have the movies/games associated with, maybe that's possible. What does that mean for the literary heritage? Sure, something like Lord of the Rings or Shakespeare will likely stand the test of time, but you can easily have something a tier below that just becomes mostly forgotten. Is it going to become a point where you need to find the secret order of the somewhat obscure classic to preserve it for future generations? The baidu board for Gu Long doesn't really have much activity and he's easily #2 in Chinese authors. I already see some people talking about maybe it'll end up being more relevant because Gu Long's stuff gets exported to Japan and Japanese with an even stronger light-novel culture might focus more on illustrations of scantily clad females so maybe there will be more interest. I don't know if it's a terrible thing, but it does seem pretty sad to look forward to that whatever thing you were interested in needs to be changed drastically to even have a corner somewhere to talk about it.
It seems like everything is just so fragmentized that unless you can't even find people in a particular topic unless it's something really big. Further, it seems like everyone's attention span is so short, you don't even get some well drawn out fights, whether it's politics or Nintendo versus Sony or whether your favorite character is stronger than my favorite character. In fact, this community is a pretty significant anomaly to what I know of. Let's take the politics discussion. As far as I can tell at least everyone put in stuff that they thought was what they believe as opposed to copy & paste it from somewhere. Forget whether the discussion is civil or good or legitimate at the moment. If you go to say a major news network (e.g. CNN) most of the posts can be finished in one sentence and the guys who have more than to say either copy & pasted it from somewhere or is a bot. We probably should be thankful that Russia supposedly runs Internet trolls to spread disinformation, because without them there could be considerably less source of controversy/discussion. I don't think this is an issue of people are more busy with their time or that they're less interested in repeating the same thing. At least things like politics shouldn't get old, and a true passionate fan should always be able to tell you why this game or this system or this character is totally better than the other thing.
Where do you even go to have discussion in today's Internet, let alone meaningful discussion? Anything that's not super mainstream you end up with a community of 10 guys that might post once a week if you're lucky. I guess sometimes you get lucky if there happens to be a central source for whatever you're interested in, like say Shoryuken.com for fighting fans, but in general that cannot be expected and fighting game is a rather large following anyway. It seems to me there's going to be a point where significant part of our culture is just completely lost. For example, High Score Girl is about two kids growing up in the Street Fighter 2 arcade era. Of course arcade don't exist anymore and teenagers now might very well say 'what the heck is this arcade the main characters are playing at?' Gu Long, who is generally considered second only to Jin Yong in terms of influence on modern Chinese writing, will probably only be known for cheap mobile ports that carries his name and Chinese of today's generation would be expected to know what he actually wrote. Bookstores certainly don't carry his novels in significant numbers anymore, and of course I'm not even sure how retail bookstores even survive today. In fact the entire fantasy martial arts writing genre for Chinese seems to be replaced by cheap fanfiction on the Net (I thin they call it light-novel), and yes the worst of those novels did read like fanfiction too, but it's not something so bad that can be replaced by fanfiction. Nirvana in Fire is probably the biggest light-novel and sure, I can admit that reads like the author actually has some writing ability, but it's still nowhere comparable. Are we going to enter an age where some random popular fanfic writing on the Internet becomes more well-known than Lord of the Rings? If Lord of the Rings doesn't have the movies/games associated with, maybe that's possible. What does that mean for the literary heritage? Sure, something like Lord of the Rings or Shakespeare will likely stand the test of time, but you can easily have something a tier below that just becomes mostly forgotten. Is it going to become a point where you need to find the secret order of the somewhat obscure classic to preserve it for future generations? The baidu board for Gu Long doesn't really have much activity and he's easily #2 in Chinese authors. I already see some people talking about maybe it'll end up being more relevant because Gu Long's stuff gets exported to Japan and Japanese with an even stronger light-novel culture might focus more on illustrations of scantily clad females so maybe there will be more interest. I don't know if it's a terrible thing, but it does seem pretty sad to look forward to that whatever thing you were interested in needs to be changed drastically to even have a corner somewhere to talk about it.
