On Campus, Vampires are Besting the Beats

Picking up a Stephanie Meyer novel is perfectly adequate and even acceptable for a weekend's light reading, but when this choice is constantly made over books with more intellectual merit- like those of Ernest Hemingway- there is a problem. It seems as though the generation of today only wants meaningless fluff and that fluff in as little words as possible. This is precisely the issue that is dealt with in the article "On Campus, Vampires are Besting the Beats." The author discusses how it is more likely that books by Stephanie Meyer and Barack Obama will creep up in college campuses, rather than those of Eldridge Cleaver or Sylvia Plath. The author credits this partially to the growing age of technology. People are more apt to turn on the computer and tune in to the television to instantaneously receive an infantile version of what a good piece of literature requires several hundred pages to develop. Because of internet developments like Twitter and Facebook statuses, it appears to be the trend to choose watered-down visages of the truly insightful intellect that could otherwise be obtained. Or, in other words, less is more. It is believed that anything you have to work for is not worth your time, when, in fact, it is quite the opposite. Sometimes the things with the most to offer require a little work, like deciphering the controversial metaphors and trudging through the complex structures of higher level authors.