Sven Birkerts, Composing Cyberspace

Sven Birkerts,
"Into the Electronic Medium"

Sven Birkerts (b. 1943) is a literary critic and writing teacher in the master of fine arts programs at Bennington College and Emerson College (Vermont). His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, Harper's, and The New Republic, among other magazines and journals. His books include An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on 20th-Century Literature (William Morrow, 1987), American Energies: Essays on Fiction (William Morrow, 1992), and Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse (McGraw-Hill, 1996). This selection is from The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Faber & Faber, 1994).

"Into the Electronic Medium" (Composing Cyberspace p. 311) is not available online.

1. Birkerts says that for "the average urban or suburban dweller today .... a communications net ... has fallen over everything" to the point where even "trees and rocks have receded" (¶s 11-12). To what extent do you identify with this description of people's alienation from nature and geography today? How much do you think technology is responsible for such alienation?

2. How is information organized and received differently, according to Birkerts, in "the order of print" versus "The electronic order"? How do you experience these two orders, or the tension between them, in your own life?

3. How is the transition from print media to electronic media "reweaving the entire social and cultural web" (¶ 21), according to Birkerts? As he says, whether all these changes sound "dire or merely 'different' will depend upon the reader's own values and priorities" (¶ 35). What values and priorities does Birkerts express or imply? How do these compare with yours? How "dire" do the changes he describes sound to you?

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