And the dim shall inherit the earth...

If there is one thing I will never understand, is how people can go through life without reading. It makes no sense to me. So many people I have spoken to, even those in the 'creative' industries (of which I work in an auxiliary annex), freely admit they haven't read a work of fiction since school, or more appropriately since they were last forced to. Some will say they read biographies, and one might argue that they can often be works of pure fiction, but it does seem to me that a huge number of people do not read for pleasure once they leave their teens.

I read. I read a variety of books. Yes, it is a fact that the mainstay of my literary appetite comes from the scifi/fantasy genre, but alongside this is more classic works of literature: I recently got heavily into the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, and am currently reading that masterpiece that is 1984. The point in reading, I feel, is not just for escapism, but to fuel the fires of the imagination, to cast yourself out if the mundanities and solid 'facts' of our day to day existence and wonder 'What if...'. What if the world was not as it is? What if things were different, we were different? Fiction, good fiction, is a way to look at the world as it is, the end result of a billion-billion choices and decisions, within a framework we take for granted, that have led us to this place, this 'now'. To accept the world as it is is the first step to self-imposed servitude and ends in losing the spark, the soul of what makes us human: The thirst for new. We stepped out of our caves, looked up and broke the bonds of our birthplace. In the last 100 years we have gone from insular units to being connected to nearly every other person on the planet. Information is streamed to us in a multitude of different ways through technology that so often is, as Arthur C. Clarke once magnificently put it, indistinguishable from magic.

And all this is well and good, it shows that we are still pushing boundaries, looking for the new and the illuminating unexplained. But so much of what we experience nowadays is presented to us as a passive experience. I won't declaim all of TV, film and the Internet, but it has taken some of the passion out of life. More people will choose watch other peoples imagination, rather than utilise their own. Again, I will not deride even these lowest common denominator shows (nor will I mention them specifically) for everything has their place and sometimes even I just want to collapse and be entertained without effort, but it should be in moderation, balanced with other stimulus. People define their experience relative to mass media, add those elements to their own self. When the stories you see wear the same tracks in your mind over and over it is nigh on impossible to be derailed from them.

Take film. More releases than ever before are sequels or remakes. Rather than risk something new, studios are just retreading the same Intellectual Property to cash in on peoples prior sympathies - A real case of if it ain't broke, re-release it. It's not just the studios fault. 70 or so years ago, people were taking inspiration for their films from literature and theatre. Over time this the source of inspiration has switched to films and TV - Can we see the flaw here? People are taking their inspiration from media which itself was inspired from other sources. Sometimes, particularly the case with remakes, it is a couple of generations of inbreeding before you find a pure external source. This dilution of imagination, along with a rising level of political correctness/mass-market appeal means that stories are so water-down and unengaging that peoples brains are atrophying.

Not all media is guilty of this. There is still hope. But I feel we need to reclaim what is lacking, strip back the mindless apocrypha that we are bombarded with, and just settle in with a good book.

But that's just my opinion...