From: sac@apple.com (Steve Cisler)
Subject: Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts
Date: 8 Feb 1995 04:06:25 -0800

A Review
copyright Steve Cisler 1995

The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven
Birkerts Faber and Faber, 1994. ISBN 0-571-19849-X. $22.95.

Sven Birkerts is worried. How much you read, where you read, what you
are doing if you aren't reading all worry this literary critic who has
spent his life with books, libraries, and working in second hand
bookshops. But most of all he seems concerned by how we read. The book,
he says, is the be best medium for deep reading, "the slow and
meditative possession of a book." _The Gutenberg Elegies_ is a collection
of fifteen essays, some original, and some written for this work in
which Birkerts traces his own love of books, book stores, and intense
and deep reading. He values the state that reading puts him in more than
the content of the book. He sides with historians Robert Darnton and
Rolf Engelsing who believe that readers from the Middle Ages until 1750
had few books and read carefully and intensively. By 1800 men were
reading extensively "they read all kinds of material, especially
newspapers, and read it only once, and then raced on to the next item."
Birkerts cites a number of authors and books but omits many of them from
the sketchy bibliography at the end of the book. As a librarian, I am
thwarted in my desire to follow the path and delve into the works that
matter to Birkerts.

Birkerts would have enjoyed the story gleefully told by a university
librarian who was critiquing a speech I had made on new technologies at
a library conference. Books were not dead. He told of the success of a
Barnes & Noble Superstore that opened in his town in a building that had
housed a large computer store (now closed), and he recounted how the
parking lot was full and the aisles crammed with readers, browsers, book
and magazine buyers. He hoped it was a metaphor for the future. I don't
think Sven Birkerts would agree.

I was asked to keep this review short for a print magazine. The editor,
a man who Owns No Television, works for a magazine  that owes a lot of
its look-and-feel to television. A book review has to fit a certain
audience and certainly can't take up too much of their time. Unless they
are captive on a cross country flight, they probably wouldn't read
something as long as a New York Review of Books feature review.  And
that is part of what literary critic Sven Birkerts thinks is wrong with
the world being changed by electronic media: "a reduced attention span
and impatience with sustained inquiry."  I decided against doing a short
review, but I found it ironic that this work was funded in part by a
grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation whose wealth was
generated by  millions of readers with an impatience for sustained
inquiry and undigested articles.

Birkerts is not a Luddite, and yet he would not find that term
pejorative. He samples the new technology (though he composes his books
on a Selectric typewriter) and finds it wanting. An essay about books on
audio cassette (a billion dollar industry) is a mix of objections--it is
too passive; he can't slow down and ruminate on a passage as he can with
a book--yet he praises about the power of the spoken word ("the triad
endures: the voice, the story, the listener.")

Birkerts knows we are moving away from the printed word and with this
comes, he says, an erosion of language, a flattening of historical
perspective, and a more illusive concept: the waning of the private
self. This is due, in part, to the new communications technologies which
allow a person to be connected any time, anywhere. Birkerts sees it as a
bug, not a feature.

In his encounter with hypertext (no mention of the World Wide Web) he
struggles through Stuart Moulthrop's _Victory Garden_,  but the mediation
of the computer and mouse are too distracting. The interface prevents
him from entering "the life of the words on the screen." The ability to
move around makes it difficult for him to read what is in front of him.
And yet he knows that many other experiments will be tested and the ones
that prevail will not be technological tours de force but ones with
something to say (and the ones that sell). Besides being worried by the
tyranny of the bottom line for publishers, he is also concerned about
the change in the writer-reader relationship, and he is unsure that
hypertext will replace linearity, "the missionary position of reading."

The most interesting essay is the final one. In "Coda: The Faustian
Pact" the author wrestles with the seductive electronic devil and Wired
magazine, his "masturbation aids." Wired puts Birkerts into a certain
"mind-track" and he studies the magazine because it embodies what he
calls the argument of our time: between technology and soul. Whereas a
true believer like George Gilder sees absolutely no down-side to
technology, Birkerts has many doubts, but he also thinks he is in the
minority, if only because the technophilic voices in print and other
media are so pervasive. It would have helped if he had read other
contemporary critiques of emerging technologies such as _Forecasting the
Telephone_ by Ithiel de Sola Pool before he claims we are in such a
different position today than we were a century ago when electricity
spread from town to town (David Nye's_Electrifying America_ is a good
work to start with). It seems to me that Birkerts is worried more about
the technologies that are not embedded in his daily life. From the
essays and the cover photo, we know that he uses audio and video
cassettes, electricity, reading glasses, typewriters, airplanes, trains,
telephones. All of these affect, perhaps indirectly, when, what, and how
people read.

Though he may not agree with the trends noted by Wired and its hired
coven of scriers, he sees much of this as inevitable.  But he takes
issue with Mitchell Kapor's July-August 1993 article "The Case for a
Jeffersonian Information Policy" because he sees individualism and
circuited interconnection as warring terms. He thinks the pervasiveness
of ATM machines, email, and home shopping contributes to the dissolution
of the sense of self. "To me the wager is clear: we gain access and
efficiency at the expense of subjective self-awareness...We talk up a
storm when it comes to policy issues (who should have jurisdiction,
etc.)...But why do we hear do few people asking whether we might not
ourselves be changing and whether the changes are necessarily for the
good?"

He also discusses Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in an Age of
Mechanical Reproduction" to show that use of technologies for personal
augmentation (phone over voice, a photograph of a painting vs. the Real
Thing, the computer for email) "sap the authority" of the authentic
personal or aesthetic experience manifested in the original work of art
or the face to face meeting of two people or a group.

_Wired_ has touched a nerve in the online world, and it has also
caused a lot of reaction in other magazines (see Gary Chapman's critique
in a recent_New Republic_) and online. The WELL conference on Wired is a
constant flow of rants about its design, its commercialism, the lack of
firewall between the advertising department and the editorial content,
its focus, and its demographics (the people in the "limousine" in Robert
Kaplan's view of the world), and while the publisher stays aloof, other
staff members dive in and defend themselves and their publication,
probably muttering to themselves G. Gordon Liddy's Nietsche-mantra:
"That which does not destroy me, makes me stronger."

The solitude of the reader and his book carries over to Birkerts view of
himself and his concerns, as outlined in this book, but I think he has a
lot of company. There are extremists such as Jerry Mander, and a very
loose confederation of writers and critics like Langdon Winner and
Theodore Roszak who believe the unquestioned changes wrought by
technology are not often beneficial. Their concerns may be sociological,
ecological, political, economic, religious, or spiritual. It ranges from
mullahs in Iran banning satellite dishes to technocrats in Singapore and
Washington, DC, worried about cybertrash on the Internet. I don't lump
Birkerts with the latter, but there are a lot of influential and
articulate people who have not bought into the future the author worries
so much about. He really is not alone at all.

Since Birkerts is not online, I plan to send this review to him, and if
I made some mistakes it's probably because I had to try and understand
his ideas from this $23 reproduction rather than journeying to New
England and reading the original manuscript in Birkerts study, as Walter
Benjamin would have wished. Recommended.

This review is copyright 1995 by Steve Cisler, Apple Library,
(sac@apple.com). It may be posted on non-profit file servers, World Wide
Web sites, gopher sites, ftp archives, bulletin boards, and magazines.
All other companies including commercials systems such as America
Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, and CD-ROM producers must contact the
author for re-distribution licenses.

>Date: Mon, 13 Feb 95 08:25:02 -0800
>From: Steve Cisler <sac@apple.com>
>To: jon@stekt.oulu.fi
>Subject: Re:  Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts
>
>You can include the review, but add that permission was obtained from
>me so that someone else does not automatically put the review on his
>CD.
>Thanks,
>Steve Cisler