A sacrifice of depth for breadth. This simple phrase and the resulting text cover, in just over 200 pages, all of the challenges that face our society in the electronic age.

Birkerts says: " we embrace the computer revolution, the information highway, with the zeal of children presented with a new toy. We are, I believe, in typical American fashion, approaching another crisis. A crisis of meaning".

I find it difficult to write about this title because Birkerts words truly resonate with me. His fear, as with many educators, is that as a culture, the US (and others) are pursuing the headlong transformation from "the Judeo-Christian premise of unfathomable mystery- and are adapting ourselves to the ersatz security of vast lateral connectedness".

You must READ this work. I cannot do justice to the title. Birkets observes, .."that while circuit and screen are ideal conduits for certain kinds of datacross-referenced information of all sorts-they are entirely inhospitable to the more subjective materials that have always been the stuff of art. That is to say, they are antithetical to inwardness.

Birkets asserts, "inward experience,including all aesthetic experience,unfolds in one kind of time, electronic communications, of their very nature, depend upon, indeed create-another.

"The time of the self is DEEP time."

Every educator engaged in the development of online learning technologies should experience some deep time with Birkerts.

 

The Gutenberg Elegies : The Fate of reading in the Electronic Age...