Changing the Subject by Sven Birkerts

Author:Sven Birkerts
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-910-2
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2015-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

Notebook: Reading in a Digital Age

There is so much change working through our systems these days—it feels like a whole new magnitude. We are all looking to acclimate to signals, data, and networks, developing new habits, new reflexes. I watch older people as they try to retool and then marvel at how easily kids who have nothing to unlearn go swimming forward. Has any population in history had a bigger gulf between its youngest and oldest members?

I ask my students about their reading habits, and though I’m not surprised to find that few read newspapers or print magazines, it seems that many check online news sources and aggregate sites incessantly. They are seldom away from their screens for long, but that’s true of us, their parents, as well.

But how do we start to measure effects—of this and everything else? The outer look of things stays much the same, which is to say that external appearances have not caught up with the often intangible transformations. Newspapers are still sold and delivered, bookstores still fill their windows with new titles. And yet …

Information comes to seem like an environment. If anything “important” happens anywhere, we will be informed. The effect of this is to pull the world in close. Nothing penetrates, or punctures. The real, which used to be defined in terms of sensory immediacy, is redefined.

From the vantage point of hindsight, that which came before so often looks quaint, at least with respect to technology. Indeed, we have a hard time imagining that the users, even if we were ourselves among them, were not at some level aware of the absurdity of what we were doing. Movies are an archive of how we live, and the oldies give us the evidence. We see the switchboard operators crisscrossing the wires into their right slots; Dad settling into his luxury automobile, all fins and chrome; Junior ringing the bell on his bike as he heads off on his paper route. The marvel is that all of them—all of us—concealed our embarrassment so well. The attitude of the present to the past … well, it depends on who is looking. The older you are, the more likely it is that your regard will be benign—indulgent, even nostalgic. Youth, by contrast, quickly gets derisive, preening itself on knowing better, entirely oblivious to the fact that its toys will be found no less preposterous by the next wave of the young.

These notions came at me the other night while I was watching the opening scenes of Wim Wenders’s 1987 film Wings of Desire, which has as its premise the active presence of angels in our midst. The scene that triggered me was set in a vast and spacious modern library. The camera swooped with angelic freedom, up the wide staircases, panning vertically to a kind of balcony outcrop where Bruno Ganz, who played one of Wenders’s angels, stood looking down. Below him people moved like insects, studying shelves, removing books, negotiating this great archive of items.

Maybe

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