Rating: 
Summary: A Prophecy Whose Time Never Came
Review: To argue his point effectively, Sven Birkerts would have needed to show evidence of some direct correlation between the internet and declining literacy. Indeed, he repeatedly states the correlation, but offers no numbers, no data, no evidence, to substantiate his claim. The bulk of his argument relies on a single experince, a catalyst for the diatribe that consumes the second half of the book. As a college professor, Birkerts claims, he experienced a kind of gap in reading ability when asking his students to read some of what we call the classics of American literature. Bothered by student's inability to grasp the prose of Henry James, Birkerts sees a generation in decline, and he blames technology.Birkerts claims are old. A hundred and fifty years ago, Henry Thoreau bemoaned the lack of deep reading on the part of his neighbors. While Thoreau didn't have a demon straw man anywhere near the internet to blame, he did have a culture in general to critique. Most people, he claimed, practiced "little reading" back in 1850, perusing superficial books on romance, travel, and the like, but having no deep grounding in the classics, in literature. We can gather from Thoreau's remarks that way back in the halcyon days of print, very few people read, and fewer still read deeply and contemplatively. If we look closely at Birkerts catalytic event, his professorial experience, and try to consider what else has changed in the past century of two, a good deal of his argument deflates. First, and perhaps most importantly, colleges have boomed in size and number. Today's average college student, who once might have been trained in a guild or by family members, expects a technical degree and a job immediately after graduation. Since companies and corporations expect their employees to come pre-trained, and are unwilling to bear the cost of training employees themselves, colleges are seen as service industries, and professors, especially English professors, bear the brunt of this new approach. In all the world, meanwhile, most people can't read, and less than one percent of people obtain any kind of college education at all. People who once might have owned two or three books still own about that many. The book really hasn't been replaced by technology of any kind; TV, internet, radio, or what have you. A displacement of sorts has happened, though, but Birkerts misses it entirely. Technology didn't replace the book. It replaced the grandfather, the parents, the story-tellers, not the story writers. And this displacement grew out of the kind of gradual historical accumulation that, as Birkerts points out, can only be retraced when we have a literate sense of history as a narrative. Books were the first link in a chain of events that gradually displaced commonality. The internet is an extenssion of Guttenberg's press, from which the first two mass-printed books in history rolled out back in the 1450s. These were, not just the Bible, as we are told, but a book on how to hunt and torture witches as well. From propigating and encouraging the Biblical and social hysterias and bigotries of the late Middle Age, to catalyzing an intensive Reformation, to cranking out the latest "literary fiction," books have evolved with us, but one fact has remained unchanged for the past five hundred years: relatively few people have read them. A decline in bibliocentric reading then, given all these factors, can only be a universal moan by professors, and not a quantitative fact. Birkerts tone, his praise of reading, echos many of my own sentiments, but his social critique simply crumbles before the raw numbers. The world, hardly literate before the internet revolution, has not become less so. Superficiality has apparently been around at least since 1850, and bad novels have received the same invective from Thoreau that Birkerts reserves for the net...
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