Originally appeared in The Boston Book Review: 9/2/94
Q&A: Sven Birkerts, Texts and Time
The ultimate point of the ever-expanding electronic web is
to bridge once and for all the individual solitude that has heretofore always
set the terms of existence.
Sven Birkerts, The Guttenberg Elegies: The Fate Of Reading
In An Electronic Age (1994)
HB: Let me start
with Socrates, in the Phaedrus, complaining
about the newfound reliance on the written word, as opposed to speech, as an
instrument of instruction. Socrates worries that the increase in literacy is
going to result in a net decrease in true intelligence. “As for wisdom,” he
says, “pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality; they will
receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in
consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite
ignorant.”
Some 2,500 years separate you and Socrates. He laments the
beginning of text-based culture, you its possible demise. Yet sometimes you
seem to share a language of opposition to impending change.
SB: The
electronic media can be conceptualized — and has been by Richard Lanham in The Electronic Word, for example — as a kind of swerve back to a
tradition of rhetoric. That’s not how I think about it.
HB: You’re not so
concerned with everything that was lost in the departure from the oral
tradition. You’re much more impressed with what was gained.
SB: I am aware,
as well, of the loss. It’s just that I see the trade-off as worthwhile, not to
mention inevitable. Now, inevitability strikes again. We’re looking once more
at fundamental transformations, and a different set of losses and gains. Nevertheless,
I can’t simply go with the argument. I can’t conclude that because electronic
is inevitable electronic is good.
It’s a matter of different ways of knowing and inhabiting
the world. For a very long time the guiding ambition was toward a certain kind of
wisdom rooted not just in language but in written language. Of course, we will
never leave language behind. But if we orient ourselves less in terms of the
written word, the printed book, and move to a set of supposed equivalencies —
the visual image, the electronic screen, the complex and simultaneous
transmission of denser webs of data — I think we lose our hold on that
tradition. What’s at risk, ultimately, is the individual compact with wisdom.