Fountain Pen on Parchment Zen and the Art of Pen on Paper

I’m back to my friend author Sven Birkerts again today, and his book, The Gutenberg Elegies. He postures that reading today is not like reading “back in the day,” where the book was the main medium for learning and gaining information. On the other hand, today’s “readers” have grown up with electronic gadgets bombarding them with song and image so that they “never experiences a sensation singly.” Here is a hint at how technology is impacting our ways of not only reading, but also writing and knowing. For example, history as contained in a book is linear, mimicking the way it actually occurs — in a straight line, governed by time. But history as contained in a computer database is not linear. It is “written” by the person accessing the database, and may never be duplicated because other users may make other choices.

As for knowing, in books, we learned content. Today, there is too much information in databases, so readers must learn how to access and manage information as opposed to filling their minds with material, albeit filtered through the eyes of the author, but content nevertheless.