DISQUS

Josh · 9 months ago

Agreed. I am not Internet evangelist, but I found Birkerts' arguments really weak. Even his best points seemed undercut by his shrill tone and lack of evidence or explanation.

Birkerts’ reference to Gutenberg in the title of his book is fitting. As I read his article, I couldn’t help but thinking of a story Clay Shirky tells in his book Here Comes Everybody. Shirky writes about the scribes - an elite group of literate monks - whose job it was, for many centuries, to hand-copy books. That is, until the 1400’s when Gutenberg came along. “Suddenly,” writes Josh Benton, describing the scene, “scribes were no longer a necessary link between knowledge and learner.” And as the printing press spread across Europe, the scribes sounded remarkably like Birkerts, warning of all that we will lose if we allow technology to reshape reading.

My expanded thoughts are here: http://stearns.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/on-not-...