Which is a lot easier to learn these days. At least to a point. Used to be you'd have to find a tutor. You might with luck find a recording -- on vinyl, even (we had one at our old house of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or, as it became known in our family, the "Grain Knickt.")
***
How well you learn it is another matter. It is a constant back-and-forth from the Maker movement, and lately I've been seeing it in musical instrument instruction. You can learn from YouTube. It still isn't optimal.
But we've reached the future predicted in such works as "The Machine Stops" (by E.M. Forster, of all people). Short attention spans...but still driven by the social need to possess and demonstrate knowledge.
With the increasingly interconnectivity (and searchability) of the modern knowledge base, getting social standing increasingly rests on either obscurity or novelty.
In the later, there is social currency in being current. In being leading edge. In being the first to discover. And this being the age we are in, this is of course being monetized where possible. Heck, you could say Omni magazine was doing the same thing, as was episodic television, "Did you hear what Will Rogers said on the air today?" back through broadsheets and...well, you get the picture.
The latest form of it is the inflated prices of early releases for video games. Being the first to release a review or play session is worth something...worth enough, at least at this moment, to pay for the game.
In the former this takes the form of ever more obscure sub-disciplines and interests, and an inevitable gate-keeping. One form this takes is of course the "Nobody is interested in that anymore; it got too popular" (to paraphrase Dizzy Dean). The other is the "False Geek Girl" accusation and similar. And boy howdy, this kind of testing of newbies has been in every hobby ever.
***
So perhaps nothing new here. Increasingly obvious, in some places. I made mention recently that the practicalities of sword fighting was a not-very widespread understanding. Until connectivity hit and HEMA is a thing and it is trivial to bump into someone who really does know what they are talking about and will shut you down.
There's a lot of that in history. Always has, but the process is faster and the diffusion wider. Places like the question-and-answer forum Quora make it easier and easier for people who really know that specific subset of a subset of a subject to find the question and give it a real answer.
And this is where we come to writing.
People who have been writing for a decade or more have developed habits. The desire to ferret out obscure and interesting things to put in the book. The desire to do the research, because research was hard and it was a worthwhile skill, valued by the audience, to get it right.
And we have trouble letting go (I'm using, I hope, the generic "we," as I've seen these problems and am trying to find how to solve them). I've read more than a few books that still seem to "show off" that they could find the date for the Battle of Lepanto or that they knew which tube station serves the Tower of London.
What I feel increasingly is the true cachet lies in the ability to synthesize. To take all that readily available but largely unformed, unfocused, even contradictory information and understand enough of the totality to make a strong and original synopsis and new insights.
Which is totally what artists and writers have always done. We're just compressing the scale. And adding to the amount of grist to mill through to get there. A Florentine might have read ten books before forming a novel insight into the nature of the Greek tragedy. Now, we have access to a thousand erudite papers (and many many more less well-formed opinions). You spend more time winnowing and less time grinding.
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But there's a counter opinion.
I self-published a novel the way I generally read now, and the way most of the writers and readers I communicate with on various media read; electronically. I only grudgingly made a hard copy available (and didn't spend nearly as much effort formatting it) because neither of my parents read online.
And oops. I've sold exactly one electronic copy. The others are all hard copy. And, sure, they are to friends and family -- they are all to friends and family -- but that only increases illumination on that point.
Not all readers are immersed in the same electronic sea.
It may be trivial today for the writer to look up the date of the Battle of Lepanto (1571), but the reading public is an aging public and one that is still in love with the physic book and they don't have the one-click ability to find out what the hell is a Lepanto anyhow?
I do this when I'm reading on Kindle. Again, this is not new. My dad tells me he pulled out an atlas to read the long chase scene in Dracula. What is different is that it is so trivial and common to a certain class of reader we are in danger of forgetting this isn't everyone's experience.
There's a divide here. The internet generation is multi-tasking and easily distracted. The book generation wants to curl up under an oak and not let anything get between them and the book. The Kindle generation is listening to music and checking email and thinks nothing of popping off the page to follow up something.
But, no. I don't know what this means. It is just one more thing to fold in over the effort to write a decent book.
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