My Ponderings

The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts is quite simply about the change that technology has had on the written word, books. In the introduction he speaks about how this is not a linear book but one of ideas. These ideas are clumped into “organic clusters.” So each of the chapters will be composed of a different idea.  In the beginning of the first chapter Birkerts talks about how refined and elegant Woolf’s writing is, and in the process of looking we see how impoverished our own grasp of language is. Then the technology is brought up and how this has affected books. He then lists several gains and losses of this technology. Gains consist of an expanded awareness, big picture thinking. For losses he feels we have lost our sense of time, no more past or thinking of the future. At the beginning of chapter two he talks about how he used to think a book reviewer wasn’t a writer or at least not something to be proud off. Then he speaks about how much he enjoyed reading and that is what led him to become a writer.
Something that I really enjoyed was the quotation “This notion of hiding, secreting myself in a text was important to me-it underlines to this day my sense of a book as a refuge.”(Pg 35) This is exactly how I’ve felt about reading. When you start a novel it is an escape, a way to leave the mundane behind. So I can easily relate to how his pleasure from reading led into becoming a writer. Something I don’t agree with is that we have “an absence of any strong vision of a personal or collective future.” (Pg27) I believe we have a better sense of our future now then we did in the past. With the help of technology our lives have become easier, now think on this, if you spend your entire day working our in the field how are you going to have time to think about your future for any sustained period. But if you live today, and technology frees up a large portion of your day how likely are you to think about what will happen tomorrow? I believe you are very likely to think about the future. I don’t disagree with everything Birkerts has said, but I feel he views technology to harshly. Sure our use of tech, mainly texting, subdues the need to be face to face, and some people prefer to text instead of talk to one another. But to say that as a whole we are losing our connectedness is too much off a stretch.
Some questions that I have are why he feels so strongly that technology is ruining the written word? I don’t get how writing a book faster on a laptop can diminish the essence of the book. How would it be different if you had handwritten it or typed it on a typewriter? The story would be the same. I think he is too caught up in this belief that the past was so wonderful, and those were the “good old days.” There’s a simple explanation for that scientifically, as we age our brain subdues painful memories or thoughts, it’s a kind of safety measure. So everyone as they get older believes that the past was wonderful because we block our harsh memories of reality. This, I think is why he feels the past was so great, he is being nostalgic.