Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Sven Birkerts says computers are destroying literature. He couldn't be more wrong.
Mar 30, 2000 | Sven Birkerts stopped by our city last year to sign his latest book, "Readings," and to bring his Save the Book crusade to the Minneapolis Friends of the Library. I went to hear him because I consider myself not just a friend but a devoted parishioner. I think of libraries and bookstores as lay-missionary posts, functioning as the secular outreach program of the Church of the Word. Also, I have a personal stake in his subject because some years ago I wrote a long review-essay on the future of the book in the age of the Internet and one of the sources I consulted was, naturally, Birkerts' book-length lament on the same topic, "The Gutenberg Elegies."
As I listened to Birkerts' familiar jeremiad, I found myself squirming in the itchy discomfort I always feel when I disagree with someone but find myself tongue-and-mind tied, unable to articulate what's wrong. He says we are losing the ability to read deeply. The speed of the Internet speeds up our minds. We race through sites, grabbing snippets of data as we skip and skim nimbly over oceans of information. The time is always Now; hypertext connections sizzle and evaporate.
It's not just slow and immersive reading we're losing, Birkerts says. We've reached a critical juncture in the transition from print culture to screen culture. We're metamorphosing from individual and private people to fungible, Web-linked brain connectors in a bright, buzzy, gregarious info-hive.
I empathize with his worries. I share many of them, short attention spans for example. And I share Birkerts' love for close reading, the attentive scrutiny of chapter arcs, paragraph composition, sentence structure, punctuation: all the minutiae that undergird the gorgeous scenes and portraits readers respond to in books they love.
But now, Birkerts thinks, this new technology, chatty and endlessly in the know, is changing not only our reading and thinking habits, but our very selves. Human beings are so adaptable, they're sure to get with the digital program: speedy information scanning, our brains mimicking computers, all data, no deep and complicated conversions to knowledge, and no housing anymore for a soul. I think he's wrong, in large part because his idea of print culture is so shallow -- what I distill from it is a nostalgic image of a reader, arms full of fresh books from the library, ambling through the tree-lined streets of a small town to the comfy chair in a quiet room. This has never been reality, as Birkerts knows, but even as an ideal or a standard for a civilized life it's too narrow to be inspiring.
I'll begin by proving his point about adaptability. This most human of qualities is now, in Birkerts' eyes, no longer a positive trait. In adapting to new reading and writing technologies, he tells us we are leaving our souls behind.
In cultural terms, I've gone from zero to 60 mph in less than 50 years. My childhood, in post-war Munich and then in a farming village near the Czech border, lacked the following: indoor toilets, newspapers, magazines, radio, bookstores, libraries and people who minded their absence. I received two books a year, Christmas and birthday.
Cut to the U.S after my family immigrated. One of the first singers I heard on our new radio was Elvis. I was immediately smitten. Same reaction a few years later to the Beatles. I traded the "Niebelungenlied" and the Brothers Grimm for Superman, Spiderman and Nancy Drew. We got a TV. In high school, I wrote papers in long hand, until my parents bought me an Olympia manual typewriter in my senior year. In the '70s I started using an electric machine; that was followed by an electronic typewriter with a one-line screen where I could make corrections before committing the words to the paper in the carriage. I entered the computer age in 1990, and toward the end of the century, I embraced the Netscape browser, AltaVista's search engine and an e-mail address. I'm a filament on the Web, linked intricately to all the other strands, all of us part of a humming, roaming, free-associative consciousness.
There are literary Internet cheerleaders -- Bart Kosko, Robert Coover and George Landow spring to mind -- who enthusiastically endorse this progressive interactivity of minds and chips. For them, and all the young techies out there, the fully uplinked brain is a teleology devoutly to be welcomed.
Birkerts shudders. Will the solitary, meditative individual die out? Will the fully wired, electrified world have any use for the reader, the dreamer, the critic, the scholar, the poet, each grappling with complex ideas, emotions and questions in a quiet room alone? Or will the last surviving reader and writer someday close their books forever, shut off the reading lamps and fire up the screen?
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