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Originally Posted by hildea
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I certainly get that view, and it's interesting to see how different backgrounds can give different perspectives.
Growing up in a democratic and mostly capitalist country, and reading a lot of fiction published in even more capitalist countries (UK and US, mostly), I'm very aware of the unthinking propaganda that creeps into culture when profits, and beliefs about profits, are the main influence on what gets published. It's certainly different from what I expect the planned, conscious propaganda of a dictatorship looks like, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. One typical aspect is that the safe majority view gets lots more publishing money, while authors and topics which are more risky from a commercial point of view get more rejections, are published at smaller publishing houses, and get less PR. This means that if I just pick books from what gets most attention, my reading will be heavily influenced by the dominating groups in society. I'll have to look consciously for other voices if I want to read them.
Like you, I read for enjoyment, but I tend to find better and more varied books when I make a bit of effort to seek out a wider variety of authors.
Things are changing, although not very quickly. If I reread books I read, and loved, as a teenager more than thirty years ago, I find pretty stark sexism. Today, that's better, but I'm pretty sure that if I reread today's books in thirty years, I'll notice propaganda and bias that's a lot harder to see now.
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An off topic comment about different perspectives: I was at an IT conference in Estonia a few years ago, and was part of a group which shared perspectives on IT security. In Norway, the typical view is that databases which are critical to national security (not just military stuff, but stuff that's needed for society to function) need to be kept on hardware inside our borders. Our typical threat scenario is foreign interests getting hold of, or sabotaging, critical databases. The Estonian IT people we met told us that to them it was more important to keep their critical databases outside their borders, so that in case of an invasion, a government in exile could have access to important data. I'm simplifying, and in a lot of cases it's probably better to keep copies both abroad and at home, but it was really interesting to see how a different history led to a very different view of threats and security.
I loved what I saw of Tallinn, by the way  |
Thank you.
I almost never travel, but if I should get an urge some day, Norway has always been very high on my list of hypothetical travel destinations.
I don't actually select my books by bestseller lists or other people's recommendations/reviews/opinions. I select them purely by their synopsis and reading samples. So there are many small publishers and self-pubs in my library. But you're right in the sense that they still reflect my personal preferences which probably are closer to the safe majority view than not, given that I'm a straight white woman living in a country with pretty conservative all-white native population.