Can hardcover compete with cyberculture?

We Yalies often complain that with all our activities, jobs, friends, and classes, we don't have enough time to just sit down and read for pleasure. This may be true, but a busy schedule does not have to be our only excuse. In The Gutenberg Elegies, literary critic Sven Birkerts argues that the decline of pleasure reading is a direct product of the electronic age.

Birkerts draws a brilliant parallel between the physical book, with its weight, presence, and definite limits in space, and an overarching world view in which objects and ideas have depth, perspective, and permanence. These are the qualities from which meaning and significance derive, and it is precisely these qualities that are absent in the world of cyberspace, where the text floats in front of us somewhere inside the screen. Nothing is tangible; nothing is really there. Cyberspace is not permanent in the way printed text is; with a simple electronic error or the flick of an off switch, the text is gone without a trace.

As we transmit more and more of our ideas through cyberspace, we have less and less contact with the physical page. The internet has certainly increased the amount of information easily available to the public, but it has also made inalterable changes to the experience of reading. For Birkerts, the best thing about reading is not the information gained from books, but rather the experience of reading itself and the ability to absorb oneself in a good book. When we read, we yield control of our own experience and submit to the guidance of an author, entering into the alternate reality of the narrative. It is precisely this potential for absorption that the electronic age endangers; the more information we have available to us, the less willing we are to devote our time to genuinely contemplating the information offered us. As information becomes more readily available, we lose the simple pleasure we once had in reading it.

Birkerts also notes that the manner in which electronic information reaches us has a tendency to flatten our historical perspective. The linear, paginated structure of books mirrors the chronological, bounded nature of narrative itself. When we divorce information from just such a structuring principle, we lose the sense of relationships between data. In cyberspace we can jump from any topic to any number of links with the click of a mouse. A book can be attributed to a single author and time period, but the fluid, evolving information on the internet comes from any number of unnamed sources and lacks the permanence of a finite, carefully crafted work.

Birkerts perceives the information age as a threat to the internal development engendered by frequent reading. Clearly, Birkerts's interpretation is colored by the fact that he is a literary critic and, inevitably, a great lover of books. His critique is unapo-logetically literary, and he provides no statistics or hard evidence to back up his claims. As a result, he pays little attention to specific factual data which might indicate that people still rely on books and newspapers even when the same information is freely accessible on the Web. The subjectivity of Birkerts's account undercuts the validity of his theories and leaves his ideas open to question. His likening of books to a coherent world view, and reading to a rich inner life, may have a slightly hyperbolic tone, but it is precisely these parallels that make the book so compelling.

The Gutenberg Elegies is imbued with Birkerts's lifelong passion for books. Despite its relentless subjectivity, it is still a powerful testimony to the value of reading in an increasingly computerized society.

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