How does reading influence our personality and how can it be changed by reading electronic books? These issues are crucial in Sven Birkerts’ book “The Gutenberg Elegies: the Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age”. Through a series of biographical and anecdotal essays the author shares with us his nostalgia for normal books written on paper and opposes normal reading to technologies which prevent people from self-development and self-making. Birkerts holds that only books written on paper may give us a unique opportunity to pause, re-read, memorize and think of what we have just read while digital words destroy our souls.
However, Birkerts’ ideas were much criticized since his arguments do not seem very convincing in relation to the devilish nature of new technologies. For instance, Denis Baron in his blog post “Should everybody write? The destabilizing technologies of communication” starts his reasoning from the history of writing and concludes that invention of the printing machine transformed writing into copying since people were mostly using it to copy someone’s thoughts. Baron does not agree that technologies spoil our lives and destroy our souls as every new technology just changes the way how we write and read. According to Baron, Socrates worried that writing would make us forget how to retell stories, so from this point of view Birkerts’ reasoning is similar to Socrates’ angst. Baron ironically notes that “there’s always someone who objects to a new technology roll out. Critics of the first wheel probably argued that round technologies sped up the pace of life too much and longed for the good old days of feet planted firmly on the ground” (Baron, 10). So the real issue, according to Baron consists not in the way we write, but what and how we write. His main reasoning is that not everyone may be a writer and not everyone should write since the crucial problem of the Internet is that anyone can text, post and twit anything he wants without thinking of readers, without analyzing the consequences of such irresponsible and useless writing.
Similarly, James McWilliams in his article “Saving the Self in the Age of the Selfie” frets over the quality of thinking influenced by people’s Internet addiction. This author is more focused on how the Internet is capable to destroy our self easing our lives. According to McWilliams, many people nowadays cannot live without Internet because it significantly eases our lives: when you are bored, you start to check your messages in social networks or make new posts, when you don’t want to talk to someone, you send him or her a message and so on. Here McWilliams agrees with Sherry Turkle, who thinks that a conversation represents a real stress for people because it may reveal what they hide from themselves: “In this respect, it requires us to court stress by forcing us to be patient with the ambiguity and awkwardness of an unscripted exchange. (If you don’t think conversation is stressful, think of how many seemingly innocuous ones you try to avoid.)” (McWilliams). However, McWilliams extends Turkle’s argument by concluding that Internet weakens our self which is not any more capable to resist real stresses, boredom or any challenges of the real life. McWilliams introduces the term of “cybernetic tyranny” giving example of one student who checks her messages when she wakes up, works with her computer at breakfast, reads new posts even being in lectures and finishes her day completing online assignments. All this, according to the author, leads to the fact that you do not manage any more your life, but the Internet controls you everywhere so that you may easily lose yourself in this virtual world.
In summary, Baron’s and McWilliams’ arguments seem to be more persuasive than Birkerts’ ones as both authors analyze the nature of new technologies very deeply and thoroughly in contrast with Birkerts whose reasoning is a nostalgia for written books. Birkerts does not think of what to read, but only of how to read which is, to my mind, less important than the content. If I was to forward Baron’s and McWilliams’ arguments in my own essays about the electronic millennium, I would give more examples which support new technologies which are really capable to ease people’s life (e.g. urgent messages in case of emergency) and contrast them to the example of the overwhelming use of gadgets when people lose their self scrolling endless posts and spending all their time chatting.
Works cited
Baron, Denis. Should everybody write? The destabilizing technologies of communication. n.d. Web. 1 Apr. 2016 <http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/482/482readings/shouldeverybodywrite.pdf>
McWilliams, James. Saving the Self in the Age of the Selfie. N.d. Web. 1 Apr. 2016 <https://theamericanscholar.org/saving-the-self-in-the-age-of-the-selfie/?utm_source=email#.Vv4v6PmLTIW>
