Sven Birkerts has some interesting and thoughtful things to say about books and reading but he also has a tendency to get me riled up too. If one could organize types of readers into political parties, Birkerts would be a staunch old-school conservative talking tradition, values and morals, there is a canon and the book is a sacred object let’s bow down and worship at the altar of Literature and listen to the sermons of the high priests (aka critics and academics). In comparison, I would be a flaming liberal of the radical sort who believes in inclusiveness, diversity, tradition if it is useful but otherwise get rid of it and try something new, peace, love and happiness for all in whatever format they want it on whatever device is most convenient. The book as object is not sacred, it’s the story that matters and as for the high priests, well, I like to talk back.
Birkerts currently has an essay in The American Scholar called Reading in a Digital Age. It is rather long and perhaps because I read it off and on over two days at work between patrons and other library tasks it doesn’t really seem to be about reading in a digital age at all but more like an essay on “why I like reading and think it is important” combined with an elegy for what Birkerts sees as the end reading and therefore the end of civilization and humanity. It’s kind of a weird essay. Please someone else read it and let me know if it is me or if you think it’s kind of weird and all over the place too.
Birkerts rubs me the wrong way so often that I took notes while reading the article, copied out passages and argued with it. To what end I did this I have no idea because I won’t subject you to all of them, there is too much. I’ll limit myself to just a few things.
Part of the article has Birkerts mulling over brain science and what he sees as alarming developments. He read recently that scientists are beginning to believe, and find evidence to support, the idea that mind is a function of the brain produced by complex chemical reactions, that mind is not some amorphous thing that is somehow spilt off from us but also part of us. Scientists are saying that this solves the old mind/body argument quite nicely, placing mind squarely in the body itself. Birkerts is bothered by this:
Brain functioning cannot stand in for mind, once mind has been unmasked as that, unless we somehow grant that the nature of brain partakes of what we had allowed might be the nature of mind. Which seems logically impossible, as the nature of mind allowed possibilities of connection and fulfillment beyond the strictly material, and the nature of brain is strictly material. It means that what we had imagined to be the something more of experience is created in-house by that three-pound bundle of neurons, and that it is not pointing to a larger definition of reality so much as to a capacity for narrative projection engendered by infinitely complex chemical reactions. No chance of a wizard behind the curtain. The wizard is us, our chemicals mingling.
I don’t see how mind being a function of the brain makes all experience null and void. This bit of information, if it turns out to be true, is not going to radically alter human experience, thought or culture and if it does, it won’t be for a very, very long time.
Birkerts also has a tendency to idealize the past as being full of people who thought deeply about things, were highly imaginative and spent gobs of their time reading important books and thinking about important things. And now, technology and our Google culture is ruining it all. People don’t think deeply anymore, they don’t use their imagination because why imagine what New York City looks like when you can look it up on the internet. And of course people now have very short attention spans and sustained reading has become extremely rare and almost impossible. He worries:
My real worry has less to do with the overthrow of human intelligence by Google-powered artificial intelligence and more with the rapid erosion of certain ways of thinking—their demotion, as it were. I mean reflection, a contextual understanding of information, imaginative projection.
[and]
The Google article in The Atlantic was sub titled “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” ominous in its suggestion that brain function is being altered; that what we do is changing how we are by reconditioning our neural functioning.
[and]
But more and more comes the complaint, even from practiced readers, that it is hard to maintain attentive focus. The works have presumably not changed. What has changed is either the conditions of reading or something in the cognitive reflexes of the reader. Or both.
But to him I say Socrates never wrote anything down because he believed that books and writing would ruin humanity, keep us from thinking logically and serve as a crutch to memory. And if he would do some deeper reading in neuroscience he would know that the brain is plastic and we change it all the time. If you want to talk about reconditioning neural functioning, read Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf and she will explain in great detail how reading and writing are not innate human activities and the ways in which we change our brains to make these activities possible.
I also spend my entire day at a computer and part of my evening too. I have no problems when it comes to sustained reading. My attention span is as good as it ever was, and sometimes I think it is better than it was when I was younger because I have learned how to block out distractions better than I used to be able to (I almost missed my train stop today because I was concentrating so hard on Carlyle!). I don’t think issues with focus and attention span have much to do with computers. I think it has to do with our entire culture and the ever increasing number of leisure time possibilities.
Here I said I wouldn’t go on about Birkerts but I’ve gone and done it anyway. Sorry about that. Like I said at the beginning, he gets me riled up. We have two different world views, he and I. That doesn’t mean we don’t have any common ground, after all we both think reading is a valuable and worthwhile endeavor. He’s just a conservative and I’m a radical liberal.
On a side note, I will be away visiting my parents for the next several days. My Bookman, Waldo and Dickens will be leading the bachelor life while I am away. The boys have promised no wild parties or unseemly bachelor doings. I’ve got the Kindle charged and loaded up with books. I haven’t decided yet exactly what I will read, waiting instead to see what mood I am in when I get to the airport. As for the blog, if all goes as planned, a few selected posts from the archives will magically appear. Reduce, reuse, recycle 
Enjoy sunny CA! We’ll at least be in the same state! Tell the boys no roughhousing and watch the sci-fi and zombie consumption.
It’s not you, it is all over the place, with much questionable grammar and style, but I gather English is not his first language so perhaps we can excuse him (though not his editor!). Just to nitpick, I wouldn’t say he’s a conservative because he plainly admits that he doesn’t read to catch the “theme” or meaning of the work, but to enjoy the language and imaginative sensations of it. I think a real stick in the mud would only be interested in the moral of the story.
Coincidentally, I think much of what he is saying relates to something I recently read in “The Overflowing Brain,” which is that conscious attention and reactive attention are two (geographically) separate functions in the brain. It takes different skills to skim through a news page to locate the stories you’re interested in than to read a long article from start to finish and grasp its meaning. I don’t recall the book saying that training one form of attention weakens the other, but obviously if either skill is neglected it will atrophy.
If he was trying to say that reading with focused attention, as he does with a novel, is a kind of mental experience you can’t get online, I think he’s right, but he could have said it more clearly, and he muddies the argument by blaming the internet for the fact that people aren’t reading as many novels as he would like.
I also think he doesn’t get that the internet is a real place, and a place where you can use your imagination. From what he says about Google Earth, he sounds like a web novice—not exactly qualified to critique the internet! His use of secondary (or even tertiary) sources is questionable too. Would that level of “research” even pass muster in high school? Perhaps he doesn’t know he can read the original research articles online.
How intriguing – I’ve heard of Sven Birkets and been interested to read him, but not this article by the sounds of it. You know I’m a bit of a book worshipper in my spare time, and love you as dearly as I do, I can’t quite bring myself to love the kindle, too. BUT, I’m all for healthy debate on the issue, because debating it is going to mean sensible decisions, insight, illumination, lots of options for everyone. What I’m a bit sorry about so far is that there hasn’t been much sensible debate. It’s been two sides evangelising about what they personally want, both showing up great gaps in their arguments. So blog posts like this are just what we need – we have to keep turning this issue over and considering it as honestly and accurately as possible.
Oh and I will miss you while you are away! Take great care of yourself!
Wonderful post and review of the article. My problem with critics like Sven Birketts when they go on on on about the Internet and its adverse effect on reading is this: he simply does not know the Internet and what it is capable of doing. Like you said, what an incredibly imaginative place it is. Quite simply, my reading has improved since the internet. It has broadened my access to world literature. And I can’t imagine that this could have happened just by going to bookstores and libraries. This whole issue is about control. Whom do we listen to, who dictates what is literary, what is good? I read a lot, I read what I consider to be brilliant. But I’m not a control freak about. I don’t think that reading on Kindle is not reading. I really don’t care what or how people read, as long as they read. And people are reading. Our attention span is just fine thank you. Consider this, if reading was still not an essential human activity, technologies like Kindle would not exists. Anyway, I rant. Good post.
I’m picturing an early-20th century stereotypical bookworm: nosed pressed in a book or a magazine, reading while he’s walking, oblivious to the world around him – you know the type.
I’m picturing that same type of individual today. The only difference is that he’s holding an ebook instead of a paper book.
Technology changes. Readers don’t. A book is a book, a magazine is a magazine, an article is an article, and an etc. is an etc. whether it’s in digital form or ink on paper.
“Well…not all conservatives are staunch and old-school (ahem),” she said, adjusting herself to sit up very tall, all the while trying to look hip in her dark blue suit and sensible shoes, hair pulled tightly off her face, a chain dangling around her faintly sagging neck at the end of which a pair of pince-nez spectacles glint brightly. “After all,” she continues, “I do love Led Zeppelin, and that should account for something afterall.”
Flaming liberal makesme picture you setting the canon on fire (not the books I must add, just some list his precious canon). Vive! and all that. The reason why the Bible has been implicated in so many terribly tragic events is partly due to high priests and the fact that so many people couldn’t read and interpret the book for themselves, so I am suspicious of gatekeepers and book priests. I will join you in storming the gates
Are Sven Birkerts and Harold Bloom BFFs? They should go to hunting lodges together and chuckle softly over the faux pas of the philistines as they clink their brandy snifters.
This reminds me of Salman Rushdie’s excellent point in “In Defense of the Novel, Yet Again” that there are actually many more readers-for-pleasure now than there ever have been in the past, and that in the ages we tend to romanticize as being so appealingly literary (Georgian England, for example), only a small percentage of the people could even read, let alone read NOVELS in their non-existent “spare time.”
On the one hand I sympathize with his concerns. There are these scary statistics that come out, like that children now spend more time picking their noses than reading books or that they spend 26 hrs per day plugged into some media source or that in 2009 children spent .8 seconds more per day engaged in book burning than they did in previous years.
As you say, I think a lot of his fear of the internet is fear of the unknown. It’s easy to believe that no one reads anymore if you are not connected to hundreds of people who do. Now that I think about it, I probably would have felt his a worthy elegy 6 or 7 years ago. However, now that I’m connected to so many wonderful reading sites and book blogs online and I see the immense love there is out there for all kinds of books, my views have changed.
Have a wonderful trip! I know just what you mean about Birkerts, as I’ve read The Gutenberg Elegies and argued with him through much of that book as well. BUT if you ever read his writings on any other subject, you might like him better. He wrote an absolutely fabulous essay on Keats that I fell in love with not too long ago. I have a copy of his literary essays, and I think they will be great.