"Please turn the page for more rave reviews. . . ." (inside front cover)

Is this the most alarming sentence in the book? Does it already imply a reader of this book who doesn't know that you have to turn the page to go on reading? Not click a mouse. Not open another window. Just turn the page.

Will anyone know what a page is a few years from now? There is an acceleration in the rate of technological change that will leave book culture behind (p. 3), says Birkerts. Those who suggest that this isn't about to result in a "millenial transformation of society" (p. 5) have no sense of history or of the future. What communications technology has done, Birkerts claims, is to move us "from a condition of essential isolation into one of intense and almost unbroken mediation" (p. 5), that is, of reality filtered through electronic communications. And this in turn is changing the nature of reading. "As the world hurtles on toward its mysterious rendezvous, the old act of slowly reading a serious book becomes an elegiac exercise" (p. 6). In turn, subjectivity, or the private self that sustains reading, is bound to change. The first part of Bikerts's book, then, will be "an inquiry into the place of reading and sensibility in what is becoming an electronic culture" (p 13). The fate of literature, no less.

Of course, appealing though Birkerts's thesis is, we should recognize that he has naturalized reading in opposition to the interventions of modern technology. For example, he notes that since the end of World War II

we have stepped, collectively, out of an ancient and familiar solitude and into an enormous web of imponderable linkages. We have created the technology that not only enables us to change our basic nature, but that is making such change all but inevitable. (p. 15)

In the first place, reading books is historically a recent development (not one extending back "countless generations," p. 20). Until three hundred years ago most of the world's population was pre-literate. About half the population of Britain could read to some degree by 1800, although few of that number could read a book of the kind Birkerts refers to, either because it was prohibitively expensive (the average novel cost roughly the weekly wage of a labourer) or because reading skills were not well enough advanced. Secondly, living conditions now favour solitude much more than at any time in the past, when a family inhabited a two or three-room cottage or even one room (cf. Birkerts's own celebration of his solitude as a young would-be writer on the Maine coast, p. 55). What our "basic nature" might be is not at all clear, if the appeal is made to some sense of historical difference between then and now. If historians of the family are right (e.g., Lawrence Stone) the concept of privacy itself is a quite recent invention, dating from some time in the eighteenth century.

With these provisos out of the way, what Birkerts's thesis suggests is that the cultural place occupied for (perhaps) two hundred years by reading has now ended. In 1992, he reports, students at a local college were unable to read Henry James: they were simply unused to reading anything of any length or complexity, he says, having been raised on music, television, and video (p.19). One question left unclear by Birkerts is how this situation came about. Is it because technological changes privileged these electronic tools for Birkerts's students, or because a change in classroom methods for learning reading in the schools left them ill-equipped to respond to a literary text like James? Why didn't he ask them?

Birkerts tends to extrapolate from his anxieties about reading to culture at large: a sense of imminent apocalyptic dissolution hangs over his prose. This makes his account of reading overdetermined. He finds the past inaccessible, asking "do we know how the feeling of life has changed?" We have "no reliable access to the subjective realm" (p. 21). This stance is particularly odd, since one might have expected Birkerts to suggest reading a book at this point (say Dickens, or George Eliot) in order to know just that feeling, that subjectivity experienced in the past (he will discuss Jude the Obscure a few pages later for this purpose). His Latvian grandparents, he says, had one foot in "the real past" (p. 22), another overdetermined phrase which seems to say that the present is unreal. Our current technologies are all surface, he seems to say: "The more complex and sophisticated our systems of lateral access, the more we sacrifice in the way of depth" (p. 26). I wonder if the same interpretation could not be made (no doubt was made) of the earlier technologies to which Birkerts resorted in high school, his records of Bob Dylan, or his favourite FM music stations (p. 43).

There is a master narrative here, then, beyond the problem of reading. Contemporary culture has become fragmented and superficial (cf. p. 75). There are gains and losses, he notes. But how, I wonder, can we reconcile this particular gain with this loss: "an expanded neural capacity, an ability to accommodate a broad range of stimuli simultaneously," with "a reduced attention span and a general impatience with sustained inquiry" (p. 27). How can we be "expanded" and "reduced" at the same time, or both accommodating and impatient? Birkerts's critique stirs uneasily around prominent cultural icons, with odd flashes of insight and fine turns of phrase; but his bias against the modern makes his social analysis contradictory. Attention span is a major consideration for the act of reading, so it would make an important difference whether we can sustain more of it or less. But "expanded neural capacity" seems to me inherently unlikely. The "working memory," as psychologists term it, has been extensively studied: its capacity is rather well known and is not amenable to being changed.

But Birkerts sees the change prescribed by the new electronic world on an evolutionary scale:

by moving from the order of print to the electronic, we risk the loss of the sense of obstacle as well as the feel of the particular that have characterized our experience over millenia. We are poised at the brink of what may prove to be a kind of species mutation. We had better consider carefully what this means. (p. 31)

A question not considered by Birkerts is whether the benefits he ascribes to print could not be gained in the electronic medium, suppose I were to read James or Hardy that way. Is there anything intrinsically disabling about seeing words on a screen? His reflections at this point have unfolded in the wake of his grudging subjection (on behalf of his daughter) to Disney's film Beauty and the Beast, with its easy gratifications and marketing spinoffs. But this hardly represents what is now available electronically, on CDs or the internet, where obstacles and the particular might occur just as productively as in print (cf. my Romanticism: The CD). The fact is, we don't really know. The evidence isn't in. The studies haven't been done. As for the larger question, "species mutation" is not on the agenda. Birkerts here seems to propose a Lamarckian model of evolution in which exposure to technology will cause genetic change in following generations. But inheritance of acquired characteristics doesn't occur. Birkerts is frightening himself with shadows.

Thus the "millenial transformation of society" foreseen by Birkerts (p. 5) seems overstated, although it is certainly in tune with other apocalyptic and hyperbolic pronouncements from such electronic high priests as Rheingold or Negreponte. It is to assume that human nature is as malleable as Proteus, or one of those transformer toys, if you prefer, that can be turned inside-out. What may be at stake, however, is the act of reading as we have known it, and with it the cultural position occupied until now by the literary text. In the next commentary I examine the view of reading offered by Birkerts.