So last night I was sitting here working on my latest project when I had an epiphany: Why should I even bother with my latest project when I know few people will take the time to stop and read it?
If you can draw, people will stop and admire your efforts, and some may try to read things into it (no pun intended), but they're done in minutes and you are praised for your work or ridiculed for how bad it was. But with writing of any kind, people see a large number of letters that they have to read and think about the meaning before they decide whether they understand it, let alone like it. I've written a number of novellae and short stories and posted them in places where people may read, but my works and the works of other writers nary received any comments and fewer visitors than any single visual art gallery.
What has happened to the written arts? People are too lazy to read something. They would rather just look at a picture and have their vision of it do the work for them, instead of reading words and producing an image of some situation that is far more explicit than any painting or sketching, which only reveals a single instant in the life of the setting it depicts.
It is more or less the same thing with television. TV is so popular these days because it posesses the ability of instant gratification--one watches something on the TV, and can see for himself everything from the slightest facial expression to the biggest explosion. TV has corrupted the minds of the people, and the Internet seeks to do further corruption. People expect to be shocked and titillated right away instead of reading words and figuring everything out; if they can't figure it out, then they feel stupid because they couldn't understand what they had read. As a result, TV and movies have become more and more action-packed and are chock full of right-NOW! drama; TV is also helping people use fewer brain cells than movies with its reality TV programs.
And music? What has happened to music? More than 20 years ago, musicians who were good enough got signed on to record companies who would produce and sell records for them. These days, if your band is good enough AND can attract large amounts of fans from one or more groups, you get signed on with a record company. Though these days it seems that being signed on with a major record company means you may only perform certain kinds of music that the company wants you to perform in order to keep up your ideal "image" and thus keep your loyal fanbase eating out of your hand. If you're good enough to do all that as long as your contract is, you've got your fame and fortune all sown up.
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