Literary Blindness vs. Algorithmic Conditioning - How much of your senses have already atrophied?

 

A Literary Sense. 

When immersing yourself in a work of fiction, how much information do you actually perceive in the text as you read? I would humbly say that most people absorb very little beyond the surface descriptions. This is a result of how people have grown accustomed to consuming literary content shallowly, or more accurately, ignoring it altogether in favor of easily diluted entertainment. A habit that emerged alongside the rise of the internet. Minds are constantly focused on short, fleeting texts.

Writing is art, a byproduct of the human element, a reflection of someone’s life. The writer poured their soul into it, becoming a catalyst for an entire world—the era, the feelings, the essence—and delivered all of that into your hands. Do you understand its value? Your duty as a reader is to grow in order to meet it, to experience the content in its entirety, not the other way around.

The danger of taking the opposite path is severe, grotesque, stomach-churning. Once art is packaged, marketed, and sold, it is shaped by consumer demand rather than the artist’s vision. The content becomes diluted, homogenized, and indistinguishable from what AI can produce today. If art is forced to follow rigid, formulaic, almost algorithmic rules, it moves downward to meet generative AI, not away from it.

This is already happening in music. Most pop singers sound exactly the same: robotic voices dependent on auto-tune, equalization, and heavy editing, paired with repetitive lyrics that say nothing. They do not convey emotion, perhaps in part due to a lack of artistic talent, but mostly because streaming media algorithms demand lyrics that resonate with a very young and inexperienced audience, one that grew up with this as its baseline and will continue to seek it throughout life.

If you do not understand how the algorithm works, it is simple. If a piece of music fails to capture the listener’s attention within the first few seconds, they move on. This incentivizes songs that are immediate, repetitive, and engineered to lodge themselves in the listener’s mind, encouraging a young, distracted audience to press play again and again. The system then rewards this behavior by boosting such content, which in turn generates more profit.

The same logic now governs social media and, increasingly, books. If there is no instant hook, no constant stimulation, no easily digestible momentum, the algorithm buries the work. Complexity, patience, and slow-building depth are punished. What is not optimized for immediacy is quietly pushed into obscurity.

Back to literature 

“Tolkien has great themes but writes badly,” a friend recently told me, more times than I cared to hear, and I will use that remark as a starting point. It is, in fact, a fascinating and surprisingly common debate in literary circles. While I disagree with the conclusion, my grumpy friend’s criticism touches on a nuanced truth: literary merit, commercial success, and influential story ideas are not the same thing.

A dull perspective will fail to see value in Tolkien beyond his commercial success and the influence of his themes. This is the case for many modern readers, especially those accustomed to fast-paced, cinematic, or minimalist prose, who find Tolkien’s writing challenging. The usual criticisms tend to fall into a few categories.

Pacing. The early chapters, such as Concerning Hobbits, the long stay in the Shire, or the episode with Tom Bombadil, can feel like a slow meander. This is a deliberate ramble meant to establish a world. It is part of the author’s essence bleeding into the page, but it does test the reader’s patience.

Archaising language. Tolkien’s prose consciously echoes older epics and sagas. His sentences are often long, formal, and heavy with description. The style feels old-fashioned by design, and that sensibility does not resonate with everyone.

Still, to say that Tolkien “writes badly” is to misunderstand both his aim and his craft. He was not trying to write a taut thriller. He was attempting something far more unusual: the creation of a mythology for England, written in the mode of the ancient epics he studied professionally.

Tolkien was a philologist before anything else. Middle-earth exists largely to give a home to the languages he invented, a dimension many readers do not immediately perceive. The depth of history, genealogy, and song is not filler; it is the point. The world feels ancient because it is literally constructed from the linguistic remnants of an imagined past.

His prose is also far more flexible than critics admit. Tolkien’s style shifts to match its subject. Compare the cozy, rustic language of the Shire with the eerie, fragmented horror of the Dead Marshes, the stately and elevated tone used for Gondor or Lothlórien, and the raw, stripped-down power of the final journey through Mount Doom. This is not a single flawed voice, but a deliberate stylistic toolkit.

Even the long, detailed descriptions of nature are doing thematic work. The grass, the trees, and the stones are not mere decoration. They reinforce the central conflict between enchantment and mechanism, inviting the reader to love the world that is under threat.

Tolkien is not a bad writer who stumbled into a great story. He is a highly intentional, specialized, and scholarly writer whose style is perfectly suited to a singular project, though it remains an acquired taste for the general reader.

Think of it this way: is a Gothic cathedral bad architecture because it is not sleek or minimalist like a modern skyscraper? Of course not. It serves a different purpose, follows different principles, and creates a different experience. The same distinction applies when comparing Tolkien’s prose to modern genre fiction.

Complex architecture is beautiful, and they’re taking it away from us as well, in favor of those horrible stacked square minimalist houses—but that’s another story.

Finally, closing the coffin lid… Literature is not fast food. It is enriched nourishment for the mind, meant to expand your meridians and help you reach further. Read. Stop. Think. Repeat.

The next time you read The Hobbit, perhaps you’ll hear the poetic, hymn-like voice crafted to evoke the warmth the author so clearly intended. Or perhaps you’ll keep seeing only the surface.