The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

The medium shapes the message and the message bears directly on who we are; it forms us.

A finely filamented electronic scrim has slipped between ourselves and the so-called “outside world.” The idea of spending a day, never mind a week, out of the range of all our devices sounds bold, even risky.

If a person turns from print—finding it too slow, too hard, irrelevant to the excitements of the present—then what happens to that person’s sense of culture and continuity?

If you take all of our technological innovations of the past two decades—certainly those in the fields of computing and communications—you cannot fail to see that their collective tendency is to breach the wall of isolated selfhood and to swamp us

The primary human relations—to space, time, nature, and to other people—have been subjected to a warping pressure that is something new under the sun. Those who argue that the very nature of history is change—that change is constant—are missing the point. Our era has seen an escalation of the rate of change so drastic that all possibilities of evol

As our culture is rapidly becoming electronic, we are less and less what we were, a society of isolated individuals.

The present hastens us forward, at every moment sponging up what preceded it. Only when we wrench ourselves free and perform the ceremony of memory do we grasp the extent of the change.

At any and every moment, our actions, our emotional disposition, our thoughts, our will all combine into what another person might experience as our presence. At earlier stages of history, before the advent of the sense-extending technologies, human interactions were necessarily carried out face to face, presence to presence. Before the telephone a

The adaptation changes us. We respond to the explosion of signals, the demand it creates, by fragmenting ourselves; we learn to delegate our attention in many directions at once, in controlled allotments. Multitasking, we call it. It’s amazing how quickly we’ve accustomed ourselves to this self-partitioning, to the point where any sustained focus f