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You are being manipulated |
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Condensed Life |
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It started with Cliff's Notes.
You know, the study aids printed in booklet form containing condensed versions of the world's great (and not-so-great) literature for college and high school students who don't want to take the time to actually read the world's great (and not-so-great) literature. It really boggles the mind. Can you imagine which poetic lines were cut from The Tempest? How much of Anna Karenina is still there? Call me a purist, but I think you may as well butcher a child as edit the works of the most enlightened and creative minds in human history. How can you call yourself educated (provided you actually do call yourself educated) if you've never chewed the meat of great books but only swallowed the watered-down, well-blended, fat-free, calcium-fortified versions? |
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Next came Reader's Digest Condensed Books. These are usually parings of popular novels, but occasionally classics (Jane Eyre is one I remember reading as a kid, before I knew what a condensed book was). Not quite so horrifying as Cliff's Notes, but still the bones of magnificent stories with their guts ripped out. I guess I should be grateful that people are reading any literature at all, but my problem is that I've seen an alarming trend developing. We are now witnessing the Reader's Digest Condensed Life. |
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It's not much of a step from condensing the Bible (yes, folks, it's been done) to condensing everything else we consider sacred and necessary to human culture and civilization. Examples are everywhere, such as the book "The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History," or Beakman's World, a loud, supercharged kids' science show � la MTV. Apparently we can now crunch anything into half-hour segments, complete with corporate sponsorship and product endorsement. People's attention spans are shrinking. When's the last time you gazed out a window and could enjoy the view for more than approximately 30 seconds? Think about it. Your attention wanders, your eyes glance away and back; suddenly you realize you're not even seeing the landscape anymore; you've either gone back to what you're doing or you're having an internal dialog about what's for dinner or whether you're going to get the car washed this weekend or do the laundry. We now have a collective television mentality. Even these essays are kept deliberately short because I'm very conscious of how much difficulty we all have paying attention. |
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Bathroom Books offer literature condensed even further, so you can feasibly read "War and Peace" in just over two minutes. Scary, huh? Just the person I want to have party conversation with: someone whose entire literary education was gleaned in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Survivor. What's the point of living to be seventy, eighty, ninety years old when you could learn everything you need to know by the time you're 30-- if you watch enough television and read enough condensed books, that is? What's left to find out? Besides, if you can't get it in a few seconds, who cares anyway? Hell, I'm surprised movies are still two hours long. |
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So we've become a nation of hyper-caffeinated, Prozac-addicted Attention-Deficit Disordered stimulation junkies who can't sit still or focus for more than ten minutes at a time. Sounds like prime candidates for mind-control to me. People will listen to anything rather than silence. We're not comfortable alone with ourselves anymore because we just can't pay attention to our own thoughts. |
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Not even the condensed version. |
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2001 Truman Hooks |
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Episode 4 |
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Episode 6 |
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