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

the original question remains: What does this steadily throbbing shimmer hold for us? How is it revising our ideas about the larger human project? What continuities remain, and how do we contend—collectively and individually—with all the breaks and rifts, all the spots where traditions can no longer carry us over?

What will be the fate of reading? I don’t mean the left-to-right movement of the eyes as we take in information, but the age-old practice of addressing the world by way of this inward faculty of imagination. I mean reading as a filtering of the complexities of the real through artistic narrative, reflection, and orchestration of verbal imagery.

essay “The Delta Factor,” “Why does man feel so sad in the twentieth century? Why does man feel so bad in the very age when, more than in any other age, he has succeeded in satisfying his needs and making over the world for his own use?” Why are we “lost in the cosmos?” Why do we feel so deeply, if unconsciously, disconnected?

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.

As the world hurtles on toward its mysterious rendezvous, the old act of slowly reading a serious book becomes an elegiac exercise.

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

If I were writing the same essays now, I would lay much more stress on the fact that all our new technologies affect us in tandem. They modify our reflexes and expectations at the same time that they wrap us up in an invisible fabric—like the one that the fabled Emperor wore, only this fabric is strangely actual, and capable of obscuring the nakedn

Reading is not on a continuum with the other bodily or cognitive acts. It instigates a shift, a change of state—a change analogous to, but not as totally affecting as, the change from wakefulness to sleep.

As our culture is rapidly becoming electronic, we are less and less what we were, a society of isolated individuals.