Will social media and aggregated preferences sweep away book reviewing and literary culture? There’s nothing new about the death of literature
The writer Caleb Crain is unhappy about “the intrusion of counting into the life of literature”. He believes that big data and predictive-taste algorithms are cutting humans “out of the loop”, and that social media are undermining our faith in “the mental states of other people” when those inner states aren’t acknowledged in tweets and likes.
It seems we are mired in “a new kind of disenchantment”, he says, which is devolving our sense of literary merit. As big data blurs personal opinion into preference aggregates, and as Twitter-propelled article-surfing destroys reviewing communities and the authority of critics alike, Crain contends, we have no choice but to “declare war on counting”. So that, you know, “literature will survive”.
As readers, but perhaps more so as independent publishers working at the shamelessly literary end of the scale, we are wary of any argument that assumes the new digital age will sweep away everything that matters to intelligent readers. Readers are not, as Crain might believe, more likely to equate long-term value with popularity now that Goodreads uses star ratings, and Amazon rankings have come along; nor are they likely to permit the literary canon to be shaped by sales data.
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It seems we are mired in “a new kind of disenchantment”, he says, which is devolving our sense of literary merit. As big data blurs personal opinion into preference aggregates, and as Twitter-propelled article-surfing destroys reviewing communities and the authority of critics alike, Crain contends, we have no choice but to “declare war on counting”. So that, you know, “literature will survive”.
As readers, but perhaps more so as independent publishers working at the shamelessly literary end of the scale, we are wary of any argument that assumes the new digital age will sweep away everything that matters to intelligent readers. Readers are not, as Crain might believe, more likely to equate long-term value with popularity now that Goodreads uses star ratings, and Amazon rankings have come along; nor are they likely to permit the literary canon to be shaped by sales data.
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