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

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

ideas are not the sum and substance of thought; rather, thought is as much about the motion across the water as it is about the stepping stones that allow it.

Resonance—there is no wisdom without it. Resonance is a natural phenomenon, the shadow of import alongside the body of fact, and it cannot flourish except in deep time.

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.

The difference between the epoch of early modernity and the present is, to simplify drastically, that formerly the body had time to accept the graft, the new organ, whereas now we are hurtling forward willy-nilly, assuming that if a technology is connected with communications or information processing it must be good, we must need it—and that we ha

The present hastens us forward, at every moment sponging up what preceded it. Only when we wrench ourselves free and perform the ceremony of memory do we grasp the extent of the change.

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.

The soul needs silence, time, and concentration—precisely what is required by the counter-technology of the book.

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.

Nostalgia is immediate, and tends to be more localized.