Being ignorant is bad, but being ignorant while pretending to know is even worse. I was browsing the topics of an online forum, and a thread on the democracy of ancient Athens drew my attention. One of the participants mentioned Plato’s praise of democracy as a form of government, and several others agreed.
Now, that in itself was surprising to see on a forum (and a Greek forum, to boot), since you’d expect someone bothering to comment on such a thread to know that Plato despised democracy. But there was worse in store for me: I came face-to-face with the Bandwagon Fallacy – or Appeal to Popularity. Welcome to the Internet.
Athens was the birthplace of democracy, Plato established the Academy in Athens, ergo, Plato loved democracy, right? Well, some guys on the Internet think so, therefore who am I (or Plato) to say otherwise…(more…)
At the banquet following my doctoral defense, a colleague asked me about my future plans. I mentioned that, among other things, I planned to continue writing fiction. That colleague then said something that made quite an impression on me: “The problem with writing fiction nowadays is that there are more writers than readers”. Those words really resonated with me. I don’t know if this is actually the case – instinctively I would say “it can’t be” – but I’m afraid if not literally true, then it’s pretty damn close. You don’t need me to tell you what that means in terms of supply-and-demand economics.
In the first article written for this blog, I had said this:
I hope I don’t come off as too self-important when I say that people like me […]with the artistry to create and populate fictional worlds and characters (that are still allegorically linked to “reality”), would have been revered masters and teachers in another time and another place.
This is an extreme example of the very same situation, only in reverse. It alludes to times when writing (that is, literacy itself) was not a given. To be able to write and write fiction, to boot, was something akin to witchcraft. I suppose we tend to be mesmerized by things we don’t understand; to me, knitting is like quantum physics.
But nowadays, although there might not necessarily be more writers than readers in a literal sense, the number of people who have the possibility to write something they call fiction, publish it in some way, and make it accessible to a wide – indeed an international – audience has skyrocketed.
Writing was very hard when we didn’t have typewriters. It was hard when we didn’t have computers. Now, anyone can tap on the keys and “write a novel”
The ideas explicated in the following text might to an extent be embarrassingly obvious to many fans of zombie narratives or experienced literature students and academics. But allow me to speculate that there is a significant number of people who have not considered these ideas. It is for their benefit I offer the following short analysis of what zombies can stand for.
Zombies are a popular topic of today’s narratives. Have you wondered why?
