The Medium Media Appears In Vs. Quality Of Media

So I'm pretty worried that at present, nobody I know except me has time to read books anymore. This resulted in my brother curling up in the fetal position when I tried to get him to read a book, the one Planet Of The Apes was based on.

I feel sad because on some level I know that my brother will always have more social "value" than somebody who doesn't have a film degree instead of an art school Photomedia major because of the fact that currently, it seems the following are more cool than being a writer of fiction/photographer:

1: Filmmaker 2: Film Critic 3: Game designer 4: Game Critic 5: Musician 6: DJ 7: Evel Knievel 8: Military Dude 9: Internet Critic 10: Gamer

Whereas the following is where people like me are ranked:

Pornographer Photographer (Me) Writer (Me) Fan-fic writer Poet Playwright

It seems that the "coolness" of one's profession is directly linked to the medium your creative work appears in. This is no guarantee of quality, it just refers to how cool it is and the greater likelihood or lesser likelihood anybody will bother to consume your cultural product.

I'm concerned that because my work cannot be "viddied on a screen" for the most part, that nobody will bother to read it/look at it. What are your thoughts on this?

Concur. Visual media is easier to 'get', because we have developed eyes for detecting action, movement, etc. Reading... has no action, no movement, unless you can imagine it. More people have more T Vs than books, say.

I'm not gonna go into a rant about how the majority of media is squarely aimed at the proleteriat and thier scummy reality-shows, but I think that media needs to scale itself up a bit.

Media is primarily a form of Bread and Circuses, a tool used to keep people happy.

Also, physical books are less popular nowadays but with the rise of e-books they aren't gonna die.

Yeah. Books are like C Ds and DV Ds. People are soo used to them, they will not die for a long, long, long time.

Books will always be the best medium for transferring abstract knowledge. Unless we develop psychic communication.

Reading a book a movie was based on is something I've found to be a bad idea. You get to used to the pacing from the movie and you get impatient.

That's why you read the book first. Books are typically more verbose compared to feature films.

I am almost in tears because my mean onii-chan will not read a book.

In his words: "I will NOT read a book. Not when I have a full time job. I ESPECIALLY don't want to spend my lunch break reading a BOOK, which I DON'T WANT TO WASTE MY LUNCHTIME DOING. In fact, I will probably swear off reading books for the rest of my life. See this calendar? I can see the numbers, but not the words. Because I hate reading. I don't want to read anything you've written either, because once you start reading I don't like it when I can't stop something."

Horrible, mean onii-chan...

I love reading a good book. However, I don't believe in the superiority of books. Or at least I don't think it's a hard and fast rule. There are reasons why a movie of a story could be better than a book. Things such as pacing, focus, and detail can be better done in a movie from time to time. It's not that often, I'll admit, but every once in a while the movie does get it better.

A good (and controversial) example for me is the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where I thought that for a few reasons the movies actually told the story much better than the books. (Mainly due to focus, although Faramir as written was a bit of a Mary Sue which undermined the whole corruption of the Ring storyline)

The best way to be is medium agnostic, I think. To approach works with an open mind regardless of their medium. Although, to be honest, I think in terms of information gathering, I'm less a fan of non-fiction books. I think that blogs really have a better format for the sharing of information/opinion, and reading a non-fiction opinion book is often like pulling teeth for me.