Culture Is Changing, and Fast

“We’re in the grip of a cultural panic and we have no idea whether we’re coming or going,” says The Guardian’s Books Blog. The rapidity of current cultural change can be baffling. “At the moment, the dominant note is usually strident, and all-or-nothing: ‘The novel is dead’, ‘The book is history’; ‘The movies are bankrupt’; ‘The sky is falling’; ‘We are all doomed’, etc. That’s a caricature, but it captures the mood of many interventions about ‘the condition of literature’ question. I think our difficulty, as consumers and commentators, is that this is a period of astonishing, and disorienting, change. A cultural road map at least 100 years old has been torn up in the past decade, and we are still trying to navigate without it – or with the piece of it we happen to be clutching.”