The Gutenberg Elegies: Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts
Discussing in personal and cultural terms the values of reading, and examining what may be lost as society turns towards CD-ROM, hypertext and audio books, the critic Sven Birkerts, whose essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic and Harper's, offers a defence of the place of reading and the printed word in the face of rapid technological advances. He argues that we are living in a state of intellectual emergency - an emergency caused by our willingness to embrace new technologies at the expense of the printed word. As we rush to get on-line, as we make the transition from book to screen, we are turning against some of the core premises of humanization. The printed page and the circuit-driven information technologies are not related - for Birkerts they represent fundamentally opposed forces, and in their inevitable confrontation our deepest values will be tested.