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The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
Sven Birkerts • 8 highlights
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I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities
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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.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
In the largest view, I see a deep transformation in the nature of reading, a shift from focused, sequential, text-centered engagement to a far more lateral kind of encounter.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
As I’ve written before, the speed of technology and the hyperconnectivity of society have placed us in a “never-ending now.”Like hamsters running on a wheel, we live in an endless cycle of ephemeral content consumption — a merry-go-round that spins faster and faster but never goes anywhere.Even the virtues of information consumption have
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The medium shapes the message and the message bears directly on who we are; it forms us.