Rating: 
Summary: A passionate and vigorous defense of the art of book-reading
Review: For those of us in the book-writing business (I am a technical writer), this book articulates the fears and suspicions many of us share about the impact of electronic media. Birkerts makes the strong case that the difference between hardcopy books and on-line documents is not merely the difference between 'old' and 'new'; rather, that there are significantly different underlying mechanisms, both physical and psychological, which directly impact what is being learned, and how. Birkerts makes his "ethos" argument by relating his personal history of learning to love book-reading, and of his years managing bookstores, of becoming a writer, and of teaching writing and literature in schools. He began to notice that students coming to his classes increasingly weren't "getting it" in reading literature: they had lost the ability to relate the themes, the "great narratives," of human history to their own lives. Much of this blame Birkerts attributes to a lack of sustained focus, an inability by the students to follow long and complex rhetoric within traditional literary structures. And Birkerts lays the blame for this directly at the feet of electronic media, where reading materials are scanned, not read; where the rush of information overwhelms the critical faculties needed for evaluation, reflection, and integration. For Birkerts, the difference between reading a book -- a physical structure with both substance and texture -- and reading the same material in an on-line format is the way with which the reader can and will interact with that material. "The Gutenberg Elegies" posits that the difference is not just one of experience and style, but that the physics and form of on-line presentation make sustained focus and contemplation nearly impossible. Birkerts writes, "Wisdom can only survive as a cultural ideal where there is a possibility of vertical consciousness. Wisdom has nothing to do with the gathering or organizing of facts -- this is basic. Wisdom is a seeing *through* facts, a penetration to the underlying laws and patterns. It relates the immediate to something larger -- to a context, yes, but also to a big picture that refers to human endeavor *sub specie aeternitatis*, under the aspect of eternity. To see through data, one must have something to see through *to*... It is one thing to absorb a fact, to situate it alongside other facts in a configuration, and quite another to contemplate that fact at leisure, allowing it to declare its connection with other facts, its thematic destiny, its resonance." The Gutenberg Elegies is a stimulating discussion of the impact of electronic media on our culture for now and for the future, and a battle-cry for those who don't want the art of book-reading crushed by technology.
Rating: 
Summary: The End(s) of Reading
Review: by Andrew Stauffer
University of Virginia
Sven Birkerts doesn't approve of what you're doing right now. Reading (or writing) an on-line review of his recent book, _The Gutenberg Elegies_, is like discussing an exercise program over hot fudge sundaes: we are participating in the burgeoning electronic culture that Birkerts urges his readers to resist. He recommends we turn off the computer, stop our superficial surfing through web sites and TV channels, curl up somewhere with a good book, and -- here's the hard part -- actually read the thing. Birkerts argues that reading books has become difficult for us, precisely because of our saturation with electronic communications media. Television began the destruction of reading; the computer and its electronic attendants have arrived to finish the job. As Birkerts' argues compellingly, the decline of the printed word means the tranformation fo the reading experience, which involves the deep and deliberately slow processes of imaginative thought. Such experience is undone by our desire for increasingly rapid movement across large arrays of text and images -- a desire both inflamed and fulfilled by evolving systems of electronic communication. In _The Gutenberg Elegies_, Birkerts claims his place in a long and noble line of embattled humanists who have refused the seductions of the technological. According to Plato, the Egyptian god who introduced writing as a new technology praised its usefulness as an aid to memory and wisdom. The king of Egypt, however, took a different view. He saw the destructive potential of this new form of communication, which would eradicate the need for memory and the more patient routes to wisdom. Birkerts similarly asserts grave doubts about the electronic dispensations and sunny reassurances of such modern divinities as Bill Gates and Nicholas Negroponte. He asks us to tally our losses as we turn from ink marks on paper to strands of binary code flowing through microchips. Like the Egyptian king, he fears that we will learn to access archives without using our memories, and to command information without possessing wisdom. We will forget, Birkerts maintains, the importance of the private reading experience to the development of our secular souls. We are unlikely to get a more eloquent champion of the sheer pleasures of reading books. Birkerts devotes his first seven chapters to the delightful sensual and mental phenomonology of the reading process. This is a book that makes you want to read more books, not by inflicting guilt so much as by reminding you of the unique satisfactions they -- including _The Gutenberg Elegies_ itself -- can provide. The second half of the book considers our "proto- electronic" age and the slick beasts that slouch towards Silicon Valley to be born. As the father of a 5-year-old, Birkerts is particularly anxious about the evolution of human interaction in the coming decades. Often his book seems less of an elegy for something that is dead than a prophetic announcement that the moment of choice has arrived. In his happier moments, Birkerts hopes we may still stem the tide of electronic images and sounds, assert our love of printed materials, return to that comfortable chair with a cloth-and-paper codex in hand, and start reading again. "Reading," for Birkerts, means reading novels. However, asserting this as an essential activity of humanity is historically problematic. Novels began to appear only about 200 years ago, and were themselves greeted by fierce denunciations from moral leaders, who saw this new entertainment as a corrupter of souls, an unwholesome distraction from more serious (i.e., Biblical) reading. Birkerts position curiously parallels this one, in that he emphasizes the "soul-making" importance of literature, now facing its successor in the form of the unholy electronic multimedia display. Is the novel another shell we've outgrown, or are we abandoning it, as Birkerts claims, "at our peril?" Birkerts neglects the similarly short history of the private reading private reading experience he champions, itself a luxury of the upper and rising middle classes of the past two centuries, who could afford literacy, leisure, and light to read by. One can only praise _The Gutenberg Elegies_ as a moving record of one man's ongoing struggle with our brave new world. Even Birkerts' blind spots -- his inability to appreciate anything technological, his insufficient consideration of history -- are the result of his passionate sincerity. Everywhere his prose reminds us of its writer's commitment to intelligent human discourse: our birthright, which we may be trading away for a mere mess of data.
Rating:
Summary: Did we read the same book?
Review: I encountered this book as part of my sister's college courses. I loved it; she struggled with it, but eventually grasped the point (and got an A+ on her essay, if memory serves).
But I was looking through the essays and comments by other reviewers, and I wondered -- Did we read the same book?
I didn't see a technophobic don't-read-it-online argument; I found an intriguing series of comments on what happens to when readers encounter something alien, and what happens to a culture when what used to be "normal" is now "alien."
Were any of the rest of you forced to attempt Chaucer's Tales in the transliterated, but still semi-original Middle English? Did you find it difficult?
The literary difference between Chaucer and 1900 is approximately the same difference between 1800 and now. We've gained a lot -- you can have my Mac when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers -- but we've also lost some things that we used to take for granted.
For example, have any of you slaughtered an animal for meat, or even watched someone else do it? Have any of you used an outhouse every day of every year, because there wasn't an alternative? Have you experienced the fear that comes with the knowledge that any illness or injury, no matter how minor, might kill someone? Have you lived in a culture wherein a woman taking a walk at night, or traveling unaccompanied, was assumed to be having illicit sex? (Think about the woman who marries Proteus at the end of Shakespeare's _Two Gentleman from Verona_: Do you really think she would have agreed to marry him if she had any other choice?)
All of that was once normal. It's not any more. Our books have changed along with our culture.
And just as I struggled through Chaucer, Sven Birkerts says that younger students are struggling through older classics like _The Scarlet Letter_, not because the Internet has made us stupid, but because our notions of acceptable sexual behavior and gender roles and family roles and all of the other things that make up "normal" have changed so dramatically that the situations and character responses no longer seem plausible to the modern ear.
(Can you imagine what an educated 1800's person would make of modern works? They'd be as lost with a 2004 novel as the "media generation" is lost with an 1800s novel.)
For what it's worth, that's what I read in this book: that what was understood for centuries as common cultural ground is no longer shared by everyone in our modern world, and, as a result, our literary heritage -- the surviving communications from ancestral generations to subsequent ones -- is less accessible to this generation than it ever was before.
I thought it was a good book, and I'd like to suggest that you read it, too, and see what it says to you.
Rating: 
Summary: a strong defense of gutenberg's world
Review: i imagine birkert's offering is a reprint of a story told around the fire of a village in europe in the later 1500's. "ah," the roving storytelling lamented, "the ability to print stories on a page will dilute the power of the told story, of our culture. how would you know with out the trained inflection of my voice, my posture, my eyes what is really meant in the story of ulysses? the world is going to hell in a hand basket." i would recommend reading the last chapter of tony schwart's,
The Responsive Chord, ... as schwarts points out, for the last 500 years, what we considered learned, cultured, erudite was shaped by what we garnered from the written word. well since the early 50's with the advent of television, mass distribution of movies and now the computer and the internet, that has changed. i don't know if that is for good or bad, but mr birkert's lament will not change the fact. what he fails to mention is that by the time an eight year old today starts school he or she has already accumulated more information from TV, movies, electronic games, the internet, etc than mr birkert's generation had by the time they were in the early teens. remember in those same 1500's the church lamented the destruction of the world as they called it when copernicus then galileo noticed we were rotating around the sun. remember in the mid-1800's the church and cultured were violently upset by the use of an anethetic for operations-- god wanted us to suffer and to avoid it alters the human condition and thus is the precursor of the end of civilization. again i say i don't know what is for good or for bad, but to waste ones time with clingers to the past, be they on the written page or the computer screen, is just that-- a waste of time. ...of
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Rating:
Summary: If you don't think Birkerts made the case, I will.......
Review: In 1996, the state of Maryland announced they would spend $53 million connecting their public school system to the Internet. In 2000, the Baltimore Sun reported that a state-sponsored survey was taken in which 68 percent of all secondary school students COULD NOT find Vietnam on a world map, 63 percent COULD NOT name the decade in which the Civil War was fought and 61 percent COULD NOT name the Vice-President of the United States. The case that "access to information" DOES NOT in any way equate with knowledge could be rested on that example alone. Alas, there are so many more. While a student can, within seconds, access Cliffs Notes to Gatsby, it is unlikely that same student could expound in a cogent manner before a classroom teacher on that glorious book's various themes. While a student can download within minutes their favorite songs on an iPod, it's doubtful they could debate the merits of Gershwin, Mercer and Bernstein. And while a student could, with swift expedition, purchase tickets to the latest mind-numbing film by the overpraised Bill Murray, what are the chances they know there were TWO Richard Burton's (the brilliant Welsh actor and the homonymous explorer)? Slim, I think. Why? Because in the heedless haste from book to screen, our students and our educators have forgotten what little they knew about the past. And history shows that each new technology has caused new problems as well as alleviated old ones. Think of the automobile and antibiotics. That those kinds of concerns are not debated should be of greater concern to you and me. They used to be discussed, back when people were well-read. Blake railed against the "dark mills of progress" which stripped men of their souls. Matthew Arnold lamented that "faith in technology" was mankind's greatest ill. Ruskin, Carlyle, Balzac, Flaubert and Zola spoke out publicly, as well.......and remember, although Twain loved "the new technology" his most famous books celebrate "pre-technological" values and times. Now, I suggest you stop reading this review, log off the computer, pick up a book and at the very least, learn the meaning of the word "homonymous".
Rating:
Summary: Penetrating
Review: Many people might argue that this Amazon.com is absolutely the wrong place to review this book - it is too biased. This is because what author Sven Birkerts bemoans are electronic technologies which rapdily supplant the printed word as the primary vehicle for communications. By getting on-line and reading, as you are right now, you contribute, Birkerts would argue, to a QUOTE state of intellectual emergency UNQOUTE which a tantamount to a Faustian pact compromising our cultural integrity. How can this NOT sound unduly alarmist to anyone who spends times reading reviews or looking for books on-line? There is a more charitable interpretation of Birkerts' argument, but he unfortunately does not make it convincingly, preferring to cloister himself in lavish semantic and sentimental flourishes, rather than in informed sociology or pedagogy. Few can dispute that the web (which was not around when Berkerts' book was published in 1994) has introduced new assaults on literary style and analysis, and has become a powerful vehicle for all forms of abuse from plagiarism to an obfuscation of fact and fiction. But have electronic technologies not also afforded the potential to enrich our literary diet and experiences? Until we marshal and articulate a clearer body of evidence on these issues, Birkerts' clarion call to guard against the onslaught of electronic technologies is as helpful counsel as reverting to the labors and joys of symbolic creation through cave drawings, as our ancient literary predecessors did so well. For the moment, I will keep this book in abeyance and pursue my electronic journeys.
Rating:
Summary: Birkerts warns against an semi cultured society!
Review: Occasionally while I was reading Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies, something inside me would repeat the words, "a voice crying out in the wilderness." I first came across this image in the Old Testament. I think it appears in Isaiah and is repeated by Christ in one, if not more than one, of the gospels. If I remember correctly, Christ says that this image was Isaiah prophesying the life of John the Baptist. The voice I heard said the words stolidly and slowly with a pause after "voice" and "out." "A voice, crying out, in the wilderness." It still does. And while I don't mean to liken Birkerts to John the Baptist or suggest that he is the immediate predecessor of a messianic figure, I do think the Old Testament image is fitting. Sven Birkerts is a sort of voice crying out in the wilderness. Only his wilderness is not the harsh deserts of the Middle East but the one that's the same as our's--the new technological wilderness of the infant millennium. Published in 1984, before the arrival of the millennium, The Gutenberg Elegies is a collection of personal essays in which Birkerts examines his relationship to reading and writing and meditates on what the influx of electronic data, particularly the Internet, means and will mean to literature in the future. Simply put, Birkerts does not like new technologies. He believes that their ability to connect people is over-rated, if not something to be feared. While he can not disagree with the fact that electronic media such as e-mail and the Internet make people more connected, Birkerts feels they diminish the quality of our connections. He thinks the sheer number of avenues with which we can communicate scatters our attention and drains our energy and results in shallower interactions. Of course, there are those who say that Birkerts is over-reacting. And doubtless, there are still others who think that Birkerts' writings are sparked by a self-centered fear that the new technologies are going to mean the end of his livelihood and take away power from the elite literary class he and other writers (and publishers) belong to. I disagree with those who maintain that Birkerts is writing out of self-interest. I think he is simply a man who loves to read and write and is genuinely concerned about the future of these activities.
Rating:
Summary: Makes you think...
Review: Sven Birkerts' view of the electronic era of communication that we are currently facing is one of discontent. His thoughts are expressed in fourteen separate essays combined in The Gutenberg Elegies, (still in print). Being from the generation that has grown along with the electronic evolution, I often forget that these "gadgets" have not always been around. My perception is exactly what the author finds alarming. Because of the rapid escalation of change that has occurred in the past few decades, Birkerts feels that books are in danger of becoming "nostalgic". He uses the analogy of what the invention of photography did to traditional painting e-books and the Internet is doing to print media.
Print and the art of reading have defined our culture over the years, passing along information as well as the overall "feeling" of generations before us. Birkets feels that with the loss of interest in reading, the depth of our culture will suffer. He sees the technological shift as "part of a larger transformation that embraces whole economies and affects people at every level" (3). This is a familiar perspective, most famously coming from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. "The Medium is the Message" is the famous McLuhan concept, which could just as easily have come from Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies. Both men feel that the means by which we obtain information impacts us far more than the actual information.
In the first essay, "MahVuhHuhPuh", Birkets discusses his experience of teaching an undergraduate course in 1992. When a discussion over Henry James' "Brooksmith" revealed that the students were frustrated by the reading, Birkets' saw the future of intense reading from an alarming perspective. The fast pace of our lives has led to looking at reading classic works as a chore. When I read what Birkets had observed in his classroom, I was embarrassed that I sometimes fit in with these students. Reading this first essay allowed me to completely connect with his point. Birkerts feels that intelligence is hardly based on how well read a person is, but seems to be based more on who can navigate the Internet, and who can master the gadgets of today's world. This results in a loss of relying on our chronological sense of history. "The electronic involvement leaches out traditional meaning and a sense of self by shattering the basic space-time coordinates we have always orientated ourselves by" (219).
Throughout the book, Birkerts vividly describes personal accounts of what books have meant to him. He describes how writers and characters such as Jack Kerouac and his character Sal Paradise influenced his adolescent identity. The fate of losing this opportunity of identity and `soul' is a major concern echoed throughout The Gutenberg Elegies. Birkerts mentions many times that reading is a solitary action which provides a person access to a deeper awareness. He includes examples of how reading a certain author was like wearing a lens, "everything that happens to me seems like a possible clue in some encompassing existential mystery" (111), referring to Walker Percy. The absorption into a story through reading is a feeling that is incomparable to other forms of entertainment, allowing the retreat to a created and imagined place.
The passion and truth in this book is absolutely astounding. "Apart from giving me ideas, books have forced me to create a space for reflection; they have made certain kinds of thinking inevitable" (106). The Gutenberg Elegies did exactly that for me. This book would be an excellent resource for the aspiring writer, as well as the avid reader, and also anyone in the book business or library world.
Rating:
Summary: Penetrating
Review: The customer review section on Amazon.com is no place that I will enter into a debate on any topic, however, I would like to simply register my vote for full agreement with Mr. Birkerts. His assesment brings clarity to my observations of people and culture and the resulting nascent ideas that have been with me for several years.
On second thought, I will take a breif moment to address some of the more idiotic things being said about Birkerts' ideas.
One, it is not simply about whether or not people are reading or the degree to which they are literate. Two, the question has nothing to do with whether we are to use computers, the internet, etc., or not. So let us hear no more of these foolish accusations of technophobia; let us hear no more smug, self-satisfied observations that, even in 1850, few people read the classics in the original language, or at all. This is true but irrelevant, for we are concerned with the extent to which people are connected to the experience of being, and as far as the peripheral question of literature is concerned, with whether or not they are able to extract the meaning of a work of art to develop a narrative context for their own lives. Thoreau's disparaging comments about his rustic neighboors' reading habits belongs to a completely different sphere of observation, a completely different level of criticism, which happens to strike a similar tone.
Further, the shallowness of our culture, and youth in particular (a term which seems to be encompassing a larger and larger age group), our failed education system, and the inability for people to connect with each other and come to terms with their existence, or rather, their complete oblivion to such existential questions, or questions of the quality of things, are societal trends so pervasive and obvious, it is no longer about numerical facts, if the application to this subject matter were even possible.
Rating:
Summary: Raising the reading question
Review: There have been many interesting and intelligent reviews of this book on Amazon. Essentially they divide into two camps, those who support Birkets claim that the new technological media, primarily television and the Internet have led to a retreat from serious reading, and a general social decline toward more and more superficial relations- and those who argue that book- technology too has its own historical development, is not eternal, and is undergoing a process of transformation through being supplemented and in some cases replaced by other technologies. Among the interesting claims of the reviewers in this second group is the one that ' serious readers' were always a small minority of humanity anyway, and that today there are actually more readers for both books and Internet than there have been in the past. The anti- TV - internet school points out that reading superficial stuff on a screen cannot be compared to deep contemplative reading of a book.
In his book Birkets book shows us what he means by reading. He interprets and provides a kind of autobiographical record of his own reading experience. This is in one sense the heart of the book, and perhaps experientially and for the reader it is preferable to the main idea of the book.
My own personal view and I speak as one who has loved and been emotionally and spiritually and intellectually helped by books all my life is that the new means of reading given by the Internet also gives new worlds of information, wider and easier access to many different kinds of reading material which once were more difficult to achieve. On the other hand I do feel that there is something ' right ' in Birkets claim that skipping around click by click from one interesting item on the Internet to another cannot really give what sitting alone and 'dialoguing' with a book can. I do feel that there is something ' deeper ' in the book world than in the ' screen world' - at least to this point.
Givcn too human physical structure I do not see at this point anyway any replacement to that kind of dialogue one can have with the book.
As to the replacement/ augmentation question I think each different category of book might be examined in relation to whether the transformation into an electronic form will make the book obsolescent.It seems to reference books, and certain kinds of popular entertainment might go better on screen. But a book like Birkets requiring thought and attention still has to come to us as a book.
This book raises a question that will be with us for some time to come. It is part of the larger question of what it means to be human and what it will mean to be human in generations ahead. This is a book well- worth reading and thinking about , as many Amazon readers apparently already have.
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