The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

We are reaching the point where we have to ask not only whether works of larger significance and reach can still be created, but also whether audiences—readers, viewers, listeners—would still know how to take them in if they were.

At any and every moment, our actions, our emotional disposition, our thoughts, our will all combine into what another person might experience as our presence. At earlier stages of history, before the advent of the sense-extending technologies, human interactions were necessarily carried out face to face, presence to presence. Before the telephone a

The idea is this: that connectivity—and the ideology of connectivity—is the elimination of the opposition, the friction, that has always characterized and defined human experience.

We inhabit what writer George W. S. Trow has christened “the context of no context.”

For those who ask, with Gauguin, “Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going?”—and who feel that the answering of those questions is the grand mission of the species—the prospect of a collective life in an electronic hive is bound to seem terrifying.

We sacrifice the potential life of the solitary self by enlisting ourselves in the collective. For this, even more than the saving of labor, is finally what these systems are all about. They are not only extensions of the senses, they are extensions of the senses that put us in touch with the extended senses of others.

Aura, like soul, is one of those terms that are easy to intuitively catch the sense of, but very hard to define satisfactorily. The aura is the uniqueness, the presence, the natural emanation of a thing—its spirit.

In his justly celebrated essay, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin sets forth the idea, now almost commonplace, that the copying and disseminating of, say, a painting robs it of its aura. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique ex

The adaptation changes us. We respond to the explosion of signals, the demand it creates, by fragmenting ourselves; we learn to delegate our attention in many directions at once, in controlled allotments. Multitasking, we call it. It’s amazing how quickly we’ve accustomed ourselves to this self-partitioning, to the point where any sustained focus f