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

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

By degrees—it is happening year by year, appliance by appliance—we are wiring ourselves into a gigantic hive.

The origins of literature were, of course, oral. And although literature is grounded in the idea of speech (we can’t read without hearing words in our auditory imagination), the fact is that the invention of the written sign kicked off a process of evolution. The storyteller was naturally constrained by the attention of his listeners; thus the tale

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

How does a reading memory differ from the memory of an actual event? This is a murky business and it is made murkier still by the idiosyncratic selectivity of memory.

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

If you take all of our technological innovations of the past two decades—certainly those in the fields of computing and communications—you cannot fail to see that their collective tendency is to breach the wall of isolated selfhood and to swamp us

For while it can be many things, serious reading is above all an agency of self-making.

Soul—a vast, elusive word, and I need to be careful not to use it indiscriminately. What do I mean by it? Although I don’t want to rule out its religious sense, I am not using it, as believers have for centuries, to designate the part of ourselves that is held to be immortal. My use of soul is secular. I mean it to stand for inwardness, for that aw