Birkerts talks of technology as if it is the end of all of life and individuality.
Nature
“Nature was then; this is now. Trees and rocks have receded.” pg 120
Birkerts speaks as if the world is ending now that technology is ever expanding in society. The world is not over isolation has not ended. Nature still exists and the earth’s natural habitat was receding even before technology. Reading and books have destroyed nature because the very material aspect of the book is paper, which must be extracted from trees in nature.
Birkerts says “There are no more wildernesses, no more lonely homesteads, and, outside of cinema, no more emblems of the exalted individual.”
-Reading is not the only way to be secluded. First when a person goes to a library, to find a book, they are around other people. Where as people who are on computers don’t have to be connected to the outside world. I actually disagree with Birkerts assumption that those who are involved with technology are always connected to everything. Some people today are developing serious issues with socialization because they spend much of their time on computers instead of involving themselves with the outside world. Why is isolation such a good thing in Birkerts mind? Isolation means deprivation in my opinion. How can one evolve and think intellectually when their minds aren’t stimulated?
Individuality
Birkerts is also considered that with computers and technology individuality will be lost.
“I have a great feeling of loss and a fear about what habitations will exist for self and soul in the future.”
-His fears are a bit extreme. Maybe Birkerts just fears change. He believes that “language erosion” will occur.
I believe that exposure to technology opens the mind because people are exposed to new things they would not normally have access to, such as photos or books that are from other countries. People become ignorant when they are not exposed to other societies and cultures. This goes back to my opinion that isolation would make someone unintelligent. The people who are small-minded today are the ones that aren’t exposed to the unfamiliar. Technology is unfamiliar to Birkerts so maybe he is the unintelligent one. Birkerts also fails to address the transfer of knowledge. Youth today may not have a large list of books under their belt but students’ math skills and scientific knowledge has increased in the past 50 years. Youth may not know how to go to a library look up a book using the card catalog, but they are very capable of finding the book online and reading the exact same literature. What does it matter if the same goal is reached? It seems to me that Birkerts is just more afraid of change than the actual influx of technology into today’s society. At one point in time books were the new and unfamiliar in society, which Birkerts admits himself, but he fails to address that these changes are constantly occurring and that this evolution of technology in society is just progression in society.
An interesting quote that Birkerts used from Paglia’s work is that “Baby boomers have a multilayered, multitrack ability to deal with the world.” This quote makes sense because the world is in chaos and when a person steps outside sensory overload can occur—people learn to multitask because they have to survive in the natural environment. Reading patchwork girl is somewhat like dealing with the outside world, only people aren’t accustomed to that sensory overload after being exposed to linear and sequential literature. Birkerts generalizes that all youth may think and focus in spatial terms but what he fails to recognize is that not all youth flourish with that environment. What I mean to say is that patchwork girl is a spatial or web organization of words and I struggle when I read that work. The reason people may struggle reading patchwork girl could be that everyone was first taught to read in linear terms. If everyone were taught to read how they thought, spatially and unorganized, then patchwork girl would be easily read and other more traditional works would be the difficult ones to read. This may actually explain why some children have extreme difficulty learning to read, some children read and write backwards. Problems such as dyslexia occur, where the letters or words are rearranged. This could be due to the fact that the brain doesn’t think in linear terms and the specific order of the letters or words is unnatural to the brains processing.
