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

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

our relation to the space-time axis will be very different from what we have lived with for millennia. We will be swimming in impulses and data—the microchip will make us offers that will be very hard to refuse.

This is the sort of thing I tend to think about. I ponder the paradox—stare at it as if it were an object on the desk in front of me. I stare and wait for ideas and intuitions to gather, but I do not unpack my instruments of reason.

The triumph of the digital seems to have also brought the triumph of the factual. As literature, as the idea of literature, suffers depreciation, it gets ever harder to make the case for imagination. And what is imagination if not the animating power of inwardness? The subjective self takes in the world and fashions meaning; art and religion are it

The whole aesthetic economy is being rapidly altered, and what will replace it? Aside from glib tailored entertainments—that is, works that placate the surface itch without making us confront the deeper needs and purposes. This is an enormously important question: Can we live without addressing those?

A page was a field studded with tantalizing signs and a book was a vast play structure riddled with openings and crevices I could get inside.

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

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.

Fully engaged, we work with the writer to build our own book.