In the second half of his book (Parts II and III, pp. 115-229) Birkerts turns his attention specifically to the new electronic media -- computers in particular -- and their cultural implications. He picks up and elaborates claims made in the opening chapter, such as the loss of a sense of history in the absence of books, or the end of the private self, and in general he extends and intensifies his pessimistic, fin de siecle pronouncements. In particular, as I pointed out in the first commentary, he seems to believe in a kind of species mutation brought about by exposure to electronic media -- one indication of how alarmist Birkerts has allowed himself to become over present trends. While he has some striking points to make about the overinflated claims being made for computer-based communication, I will suggest that he fails to look carefully enough at the medium he is criticising. The computer is enabling us to communicate very productively in ways that have been impossible until now, so in my review of the situation I argue for a reversal of some of Birkerts's most pessimistic judgements.

Birkerts's arguments generally seem to depend on a sense of technological determinism. He prophesies that in ten or fifteen years from now the world will have completely changed: "We will be swimming in impulses and data" (p. 193). He believes that innovation is driven more by its own logic than our "collective needs or desires" (p. 154). Thoughout, whether explicitly or not, he adheres to the McLuhanite line of argument which sees thought shaped and controlled by the vehicle in which it is presented. He is thus in a tradition marked by such earlier movements as eighteenth century necessitarianism, Marxist ideology, linguistic relativism, social constructivism, or post-structuralist semiotics, each of which (albeit in quite different ways) shifted the agency responsible for thought onto the controlling power of the system that is supposed to act through us. He excepts his own consciousness from this totalizing regime, of course (as all prophets must). While celebrating human depth and freedom, he nevertheless allows little or none to the consumers of the new media. My own reading of culture suggests that quite the reverse of Birkerts's world of electronic zombies is coming into being. While the internet, for example, is no electronic democracy, yet it is a place of extraordinary variety and creative endeavour. Nor, I believe, does it signal the end of the book.

The internet, on the contrary, has provided another platform for celebrating and promoting books. Numerous web sites are now available for exploring books, for gaining information about specific authors, or for critical discussion. And this is quite apart from the resources now being created and maintained electronically for academic debate of earlier literary periods and specific authors, including a raft of new electronic journals. Thus Birkerts's compulsive gloom over the book is probably quite erroneous: "The printed world is part of a vestigial order that we are moving away from -- by choice and by societal compulsion" (p. 118). If he is thinking of the internet in saying this, he has failed to see the evidence. Many people who use the internet must still be content with "the snail-paced linearity of reading" (p. 119), since there is so much text out there -- reading is no faster on screen, incidentally, although a form of speed-reading is possible in either medium (it is how I read much of the daily newspaper, for example). And if "our students are less and less able to read" (p. 119), then, despite those of us who teach, much better readers are somehow appearing elsewhere, to judge by the continuing sales for serious fiction, history, or books of popular science.

The issue of readership for literary books is a complex one. Birkerts asserts the difficulty of publishing serious literary works and finding a readership for them (p. 191), which may compare unfavourably with the interest of late nineteenth century Ohio society in literature reported by Howells (p. 171). Our own recent surveys of students here have suggested that less than ten per cent now voluntarily read books that we would classify as literary (our classification excluded authors such as Stephen King or Danielle Steel, whom we saw as popular fiction). Similar findings for the United States are reported in Nicholas Zill and Marianne Winglee, Who Reads Literature? The Future of the United States as a Nation of Readers (Cabin John, MD: Seven Locks Press, 1990). Even ten per cent, however, is still a considerable market, and appears to be sufficient to sustain the major publishing houses that still produce literary writing, as well as the newspaper and journal industry that promotes it with news, reviews, and advertising. I have argued elsewhere that if literary reading has declined, this may be due to practices in school classrooms that give students a distaste for literature (see Miall, 1996). The internet, on the other hand, is a vehicle that many students are now very comfortable with, and it may actually serve to revive interest in literature. It is too early to tell.

Birkerts offers a set of comparisons between print and electronic communication which rests on several highly questionable assumptions (pp. 122-3). Print, he argues, "requires the active engagement of the reader's attention"; our engagement with it is "essentially private"; it "posits a time axis; the turning of pages . . . "; "the printed material is static"; and pace of reading is "determined by the reader's focus and comprehension." Each of these claims could just as well be made about electronic text: reading does not become passive because the words are in pixels, and print on screen does not move about, one paragraph or sentence relative to another, unless you actively change screen size while reading. The contents of the screen are said to be evanescent: "They can be changed or deleted with the stroke of a key." So they can, but only in the writing mode. And for the reading mode we have a built-in routine for "bookmarking" texts out on the web that we want to revisit.

The comparisons that Birkerts makes seem principally driven by the differences between text and image: he is concerned to deprecate the latter, because (until recently) the primary vehicle of the image has been television, a medium that was never designed to deliver text. But television must take the blame first as the medium of the perpetual now: "we only get an ever new and ever-renewable present" (p. 119). And television is also accused of disseminating the news to everyone in America through "the same basic package of edited images" (p. 120). To generalize to the computer, however, is inappropriate, given the much greater range of perspectives now available on the internet, especially the profusion of personal web sites that offer information that would never make it into a newspaper or on to television. Yet computer-based communications are judged by the same standards, with Birkerts implying that the more electronic we become the worse off we are, with the computer seen as yet another of the contemporary "morbid symptoms" (p. 121).

On the contrary, for those who have a voice on the internet, genuine and powerful exchanges are taking place beyond the control of the traditional guardians of the media (the problems of web pornography or hate literature, of course, being the downside of this process of liberation). The notion that a new web-mediated democracy is emerging is clearly premature, since computer use is still confined to the wealthier section of society (see the latest InternetTrak survey, which reports on the 53% of the adult population in the U.S.A. that are now computer users). Yet in questioning the claims of the article by Mitchell Kapor that he discusses, Birkerts objects to electronic democracy not because the technology is out of the reach of many but because the medium itself is shallow: "being on-line and having the subjective experience of depth, of existential coherence, are mutually exclusive situations" (p. 219). Yet another example of Birkerts's casual application of the McLuhanite principle.

Thus Birkerts argues that the process of reading must be influenced by the medium in which the words appear. He compares the words in a book with the dematerial nature of electronic text: "The former occupies a position in space -- on a page, in a book -- and is verifiably there. The latter, once dematerialized, digitalized back into storage, into memory, cannot be said to exist in quite the same way. It has potential, not actual, locus." This perception "cannot but affect the way the words are registered when present" (p. 155). Unfortunately such comments only serve to mystify and obscure the process of reading electronic text -- as if the reading of print, in contrast, was an obvious and understandable process. Thus Birkerts also suggests that even the origin of the words on the screen is mysterious compared with print: they "seem to arrive from some collective elsewhere that seems more profound, deeper than a mere writer's subjectivity." Yet it is not the words that have depth, he argues, but the technology:

But this does not necessarily invest the words themselves with a greater potency, for the unseen creative self of the writer is conflated with the unseen depth of the technology and, in the process, the writer's independent authority is subtly undermined. The site of veneration shifts; in the reader's subliminal perception some measure of the power belonging to the writer is handed over to the machine. (p. 156)

An examination of writing on the internet, however, shows that authors "sign" their work just as often as writers in print form, and where writing is anonymous (as on business sites, or university catalogues), it is so for the same reason that it is in printed form. Birkerts seems to fall into the common error here of anthropomorphizing the machine, which he here elevates into a "collective" with its own "power." This is an unfortunate obfuscation of the powers that drive the technology, since the corporate and government élites in question present far more of a threat to reading and writing than the electronic tool that Birkerts fears so much (the role of the élites in determining what happens in schools has already been a largely negative one, to judge by the effects of the testing and textbook systems on writing and literary reading).

Another central theme of Birkerts's complaint is the loss of a sense of history in favour of the "now." The new technology, he says, "works against historical perception, which must depend on the inimical notions of logic and sequential succession" (p. 123) -- inimical, that is, to the tyranny of the present, where "impression and image take precedence over logic and concept" (p. 122). He can find little good, for example, to say of Perseus, the electronic textbook for studying the language and culture of ancient Greece. His comments about such multimedia packages are largely dismissive: "One gathers the data of otherness, but through a medium which seems to level the feel -- the truth -- of that otherness. The field of knowledge is rendered as a lateral and synchronic enterprise susceptible to collage, not as a depth phenomenon" (p. 137)

I would suggest, on the contrary, that the computer enables a sense of history to develop in ways that were formerly out of the reach of all except the wealthy or the academic specialist. For example, the Romanticism CD that I edited includes an extensive collection of digitized prints and paintings that provide a window on the reception of landscape in the Romantic period. Most are from collections never seen by students of Romanticism. To publish a book with over 1200 prints in it, most in colour, would be out of the question. Another example, from a quite different discipline and historical period, is an online article by Bernard J. Hibbitts, "Coming to Our Senses," on non-verbal aspects of the law in medieval England with nine images from medieval manuscripts, including several in colour. The article depends in part on a closely argued reading of the images. While the essay has also appeared in a law journal, it would be inaccessible in this form to most users of the internet. Far from "flattening" historical perspective, as Birkerts puts it, the computer can be used to enrich and deepen it in hitherto unrealized ways, as these examples show: the computer is not merely a receptacle for information, or a massive database which "expunges" context or chronology (p. 129). I suspect that we will see it used in increasingly sophisticated and imaginative ways that in book technology would have been either impossible or prohibitively expensive (cf. Lanham's multimedia textbook proposal).

Not only are we losing a sense of history, but the private self is also supposed to be disappearing: "we increasingly accept the transparency of a life lived within a set of systems, electronic or otherwise . . . The monitor light is always blinking; we are always potentially on-line" (p. 130). Birkerts's comments on this issue seem unduly paranoid. Transparency implies an equality of gaze, like a window through which we can both see and be seen. But no-one sees me as I sit at my computer, except my cat that likes to sit on the desk nearby. It is true that as I cruise the internet, a site (if someone cares) can track the domain I come from, but my identity as an individual is not available unless I deliberately choose to send a note about who I am or transmit my credit card number. And as for hackers, I am about as vulnerable to a robbery at my house as I am to electronic snooping.

But Birkerts is determined to prove that the human species is changing. We are, he says, "biologically, neurophysiologically -- creatures of extraordinary adaptability" (p. 222). This is quite correct, but our adaptability biologically or neurophysiologically does not mean that we are evolving now either biologically or neurophysiologically. The fifty years in which electronic communications have become widespread is far too short a time to see evidence of that (evolutionary theorists think in terms of fifty generations, not fifty years). Yet Birkerts insists several times on our neural adaptability: "Isn't it possible that more may be less, and that the neural networks have one speed for taking in -- a speed that can be increased -- and quite another rate for retention?" (p. 138) If so, "What will happen as our neural systems, evolved through millennia to certain capacities, modify themselves to hold ever-expanding loads? Will we simply become smarter, able to hold and process more? Or do we have to reckon with some other gain/loss formula?" (p. 139). Similarly, referring to Camille Paglia's claim to operate on several sensory channels at once,"what is this ability but a new evolutionary acquisition, a neural response to changed environmental conditions" which "does not bode well in the long run for certain kinds of concentrated or deep reading" (p. 148). Birkerts's lack of understanding leads him into several such inappropriate speculations.

To turn to Birkerts's account of reading, however, is to find once again a series of valuable insights. For example, in comparing the act of reading with listening to a book being read on tape, he discovers the inner voice of the reading self and its privileges. "Until I listened to a book on tape, I didn't realize how much I depend on the freedom to slow down, speed up, or stop altogether while reading" (p. 146). During reading, he says, "we are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don't just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity" (p. 146) -- a reminder of Keats's notion of reading. Moreover, the "voice" we hear as a reader is our own; to hear the voice of the reader on the tape "amounts to a silencing of that self" (p. 147).

Birkerts is clear, as few writers have been, about the prerogatives of the self during literary reading. This makes him an interesting critic of the claims now commonly made about reading hypertext fiction, including the so-called freedom from the control of the author.

A book is a solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outside world. Hypertext . . . promises to deliver me from this, to free me from the 'liberating domination' of the author. (p. 164)

Birkerts's experience of hypertext fiction is described in several places (e.g., pp. 151, 162). Its ugly appearance and mechanical demands on the reader, he says, leave him unable to "get past the feeling of being infantilized."

But the theory and practice of hypertext fiction appear to be at odds, as Birkerts (not quite consciously) bears witness. As he later puts it, echoing the claims for hypertext fiction, "the author, the traditional originator of structure and engineer of meanings" has gone (p. 161). The absent god of the author, however, turns out not to be so far off. In reading Moulthrop's hypertext fictions, for example, hypertext structure is supposed to increase our indendence as readers, yet the continual jump-links we experience are more likely to alert us to the presence of the author; authorial control is a part of the consciousness induced by such reading. Birkerts describes his response similarly as a kind of self-consciousness. Sitting down to read a Moulthrop text (Victory Garden), the medium

all but short-circuited any capacity I may have had to enter the life of the words on the screen. I was made so fidgety by the knowledge that I was positioned in a designed environment, with the freedom to rocket from one place to another with a keystroke, that I could scarcely hold still long enough to read what was there in front of me. (p. 161)

While hypertext supposedly frees us from the domination of the author, in conventional reading, says Birkerts, we go to a book precisely in order to be dominated by an author. "The premise behind the textual interchange is that the author possesses wisdom, an insight, a way of looking at experience, that the reader wants" (p. 163). While this may be true in general terms, the reverse seems to be the case during most actual reading. In "linear" book reading we trust the author, so that like any other framing condition, once it is set in place, we tend to forget it in becoming absorbed in the narrative itself. In hypertext fiction, by contrast, the author is a trickster, a stage manager whose presence we sense in every link, so that we never forget the author for more than a moment. If, as Birkerts puts it, "Necessity is dethroned and arbitrariness is installed in its place" (p. 163), then the author of that arbitrariness is also installed in every screen and every link as we read.

But there is another context in which the supposed loss of authorial presence on screen also seems incorrect. In my reading on the internet I find personalized "home pages" and various devices to humanize the interface rather common, and this makes for one of the more attractive features of the internet. My own sense of the web site that I maintain is of a space that I am free to personalize in ways that are impossible in the printed texts I have published. This perception is quite opposite to Birkerts's appeal to Benjamin's "aura": extending this to electronic media, Birkerts claims that the aura is eroded in such media, and that this distances people. "We are experiencing the gradual but steady erosion of human presence, both of the authority of the individual and, in ways impossible to prove, of the species itself" (p. 228). Our sense that electronic instruments can put us in touch is an illusion, Birkerts claims: "Their great power is all in the service of division and acceleration. They work in -- and create -- an unreal time that has nothing to do with the deep time we thrive in: the time of history, tradition, ritual, art, and true communion" (p. 229). On the contrary, an internet site can create a lively sense of presence and communication never possible with printed text.

Birkerts mentions Alvin Kernan's report in The Death of Literature (1990) that Kernan's students "trusted" the words on the screen more than those on the page. He attempts to explain this as due to the diminishment of the printed page. "We see it as opaque, finite, not connected to what we postulate to be the near-transcendental totality of the data bank. The book dead-ends us in ourselves, whereas the screen is a sluice into the collective stratum, the place where all facts are known and all lore is encoded" (p. 188). But I wonder if this is what the students in question would say. I believe it is more a matter of trust than truth: the design capabilities we now have on the screen, its use as a vehicle to model the logic and form of the ideas being presented, makes it more compelling as a medium for many purposes than the book.

The power of the computer may in fact help to restore our relationship with the natural or material order. While Birkerts continues to lament the technology interposed between us and nature (p. 215), I see real information available as never before through the computer, which (as books almost never could) is able to picture the world and our interactions with it dynamically and to model alternative scenarios for our future interactions. The internet will bring us closer to the realities not only of nature, but also the lives of others: it can represent more, and do so more immediately, than any other available medium.

Birkerts supposes, in contrast, that our response to nature, particularly to the sublime, is failing: our technology cuts us off from direct experience, or from knowing what to do with such experience when we have it. "Each improvement [in technology] is, at bottom, an order of abstraction that we accommodate ourselves to. Abstraction is, however, a movement away from the natural given -- a step away from our fundamental selves, selves rooted for millenia in an awe before the unknown, a fear and trembling in the face of the outer dark" (p. 224). This is an odd contrast: either millenia of ignorance or the abstractions of technology. To find uses of the internet that are neither is rather easy. To the right, for example, is a link to a site for schools in New Zealand that reported live on an expedition to the Antarctic, including the use of a digital camera to enable pictures to appear on a web site almost immediately. Partly on account of such internet sites, there is perhaps a greater and better informed interest in nature now than there has ever been. Nor does this preclude the ability to "stand in isolated silence among trees and stones" (p. 215) -- or on an Antarctic glacier, which seems to me to qualify as a sublime experience.

Birkerts insists that computers mean the death of thinking. The electronic media, he claims, "are entirely inhospitable to the more subjective materials that have always been the stuff of art. That is to say, they are antithetical to inwardness" (p. 193), principally because of their antipathy to "deep time" and duration. To use them "requires that we enter a kind of virtual now -- the perpetual present tense of the impulse, of the beep, the flickering cursor" (p. 193). Yet, he suggests, all may not be lost. Perhaps the need for meaning will reassert itself; just possibly, people will want to return to the book (p. 197). To gain their attention, however, Birkerts seems to believe that books will have to become grenades. The literary text of the future will be as dangerous as a terrorist (p. 209). It's an odd conclusion for a believer in deep subjectivity.