In an essay for the Spring 2010 issue of the
American Scholar.org, “Reading in a Digital Age,” literary writer and editor Sven Birkerts contemplates the present day where, he says, “suddenly it’s impossible to imagine a world in which many interactions formerly dependent on print on paper [now] happen screen to screen.” He finds it disconcerting that people in their teens and 20s today are navigating their lives with little or no recourse to paper.
“In class,” he says of his students, “they sit with their laptops open on the table in front of them. I pretend they are taking course-related notes, but would not be surprised to find out they are writing to friends, working on papers for other courses, or just trolling their favorite sites while they listen. Whenever there is a question about anything…they give me the answer before I’ve finished my sentence… I know that I present book information to them with a slight defensiveness; I wrap my pronouncements in a preemptive irony. I could not bear to be earnest about the things that matter to me and find them received with [their] tolerant bemusement…”
But Birkerts says that his real worry “has less to do with the overthrow of human intelligence by Google-powered artificial intelligence and more with the rapid erosion of certain ways of thinking—their demotion, as it were.” He elaborates: “I mean reflection, a contextual understanding of information, imaginative projection. I mean, in my shorthand, intransitive thinking. Contemplation. Thinking for its own sake, non-instrumental, as opposed to transitive thinking, the kind that would depend on a machine-drive harvesting of facts toward some specified end.”
He then postulates and examines the idea that the novel and the Internet are opposites, with the Internet not only undermining the novel but also making it even more necessary.
Read Sven Birkerts’s “Reading in the Digital Age” in The American Scholar.org now!
