Sven Birkerts
Faber & Faber, 1994
Sven Birkerts
Faber & Faber, 1994
ISBN 0571190456 (paper)
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Birkerts has written a warm, personal, reflective and somewhat sad book, and yes, the effect it leaves behind is indeed somewhat elegiac. For this is a lament for the book: not the e-book, the hyper-book, the virtual book, nor even the splendid achievement of the Gutenberg Project to place all the classical texts of bygone, pre-copyright days in the public domain for instant downloading and patient study or automated textual analysis; but the solid, slow, old, patient paper book.
For the truth is, Birkerts argues, that e-everything -- electronic games, television, telephones, dammit even fridges and washing machines, not to mention e-business and e-warfare -- is speeding up our lives so much that our ability to take time, to absorb slowly, to digest, to reflect, in fact to read in the true sense, is gradually vanishing.
But isn't everything modern based on computing and electronics? As some wag put it half a century ago, 'a lot of things have been invented this century, and all of them plug into the wall'. Well, now they don't even have to plug in: they can be used on the road, in the ear, on the move, faster and faster. It's a small irony that one of the few places the early 21st century business man or woman can get a little rest is in an aeroplane -- for the moment; it seems that wireless LAN connections are only just around the corner, and then the poor business traveller will just be relaxing with a well-deserved gin and tonic when their machine will beep! at them, and back to work they'll obediently have to go.
Our inventions and technologies have enabled us to do more with our time, with our lives; we can write a few words and publish them across the globe (as I am now doing) in a few minutes. No more old dusty publishing houses, slow letters carefully crafted and signed in ink, long waiting for an appointment and a chance to be put into print, marketed and finally (a year or two later) actually made available to a public thirsty for books. Now we can talk straight to our audience with a few clicks of an FTP utility.
So isn't everything better now? Well, in many ways yes, things are far easier and more convenient, and often cheaper, too. But the price in human sensibility is, Birkerts argues, painfully high. Already there are hardly any students who can cope with 19th Century literature; they want the answers to be easier, pre-digested, in bite-sized fast-food nuggets.
What about engineering, though? Birkerts rightly looks from his own perspective in the humanities. Do engineers still read? My impression is that few do. Those who work in firms that charge them out by the day are pressured to earn money all the time, and their 'utilisation' -- how Dickens would have shuddered at that word! -- creeps ever upward, so that 100% is considered by no means excessive. The self-employed working as contractors can hardly be blamed if they try to schedule work wall-to-wall as well. In some enlightened countries such as the Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavia, managers still often understand that staff require time to go on training courses, attend trade conferences, meet colleagues in birds-of-a-feather workshops, and have a library where they can borrow books and journals. In Britain the picture seems to be more 'utilitarian' -- immediate work takes priority over all else, so that even training and career development mostly languish; that lamentable phrase 'on-the-job training' being a poor apology for 'no training at all'. Failing that, hard-pressed staff can, perhaps, buy books and read them, but I am continually reminded how few books many engineers actually read. How could they? There is no time; and even if there was, they are not schooled or trained to read at length, and to compare what is said with their experience, and with other recipes for doing engineering better. For this takes a critical mind; practice; and patience -- and none of these things are exactly encouraged any more in our schools and universities, let alone our engineering institutions.
Birkerts' book is based on experience; and that includes experience of hypertexts and interactive video and other such gadgetry. Birkerts is no Luddite: he is interested in the new technologies, and looks ahead to the future. That future is one in which we will live in
'a kind of amniotic environment of impulses, a condition of connectedness. And in time -- I don't know how long it will take -- it will feel as strange (and exhilarating) for a person to stand momentarily free of it as it feels now for a city dweller to look up at night and see a sky full of stars.' (page 224)
The spread of mobile telephony and computing, and the race to make computers 'pervasive' and effectively invisible inside smart devices of all kinds including clothing, suggests that Birkerts' prophecy will soon be realized.
The Gutenberg Elegies is the voice of a person who is fully human: who is striving to understand, to feel, to appreciate what is going on. The essays in this book -- and what an old form an essay now seems! -- paint word-pictures of modern life, tell stories, give examples, and above all reflect on meaning and purpose. What are we doing? Why? Where are we going? Is that going to make the world a better place? If not, what are we going to do about it? These are urgent and serious questions to ask of our technologies, and it is rare to find anything like an equally serious and intellectually capable mind actually exploring them in depth.
It is timely to consider the ultimate requirements for technological change: what are the results we want? Everyone is a stakeholder in this system. It may be that as mere engineers we have little more say than anyone else on the direction of change; but then, everyone should be considering whether we all want to live in cyberspace round the clock.
© Ian Alexander 2003
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