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extended thought 
01.12.2007, 4:57 PM
I have another concern which has been coming up recently in a variety of guises, and which I haven't had the chance to think about as much as I'd like. This is at least partially triggered by reading the new edition of Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies. What's most surprising to me was how much I've found to agree with in that book: I remember it (from reading parts a long time ago) as being a collection of reactionary texts, and, by and large, it's not the book I remembered at all.
I have realized, for a while, that many of Birkerts's concerns are my own; I wasn't particularly disagreeing with him when we had our "debate" in Boston. This isn't tremendously surprising, seeing as I come from a liberal arts background and value the place of reading in my life to a worrying degree. Reading is almost certainly the primary lens through which I view the world, a mode of thinking. Lest I tread into the swamp of mawkishness: I don't want to sentimentalize this. I don't think reading is important in and of itself. I don't buy the argument that it's better for the kids to be reading garbage than to be reading nothing. This is an assumption that underpins my argument about fantasy and Pan's Labyrinth over on the Second Life thread.
What Birkerts is championing, and what I find myself agreeing with, is the value of long-form reading as a method of shaping consciousness. This is a clunky way to put it. But this comes back around to our continuing problems of defining what exactly a book is, in the context of the Institute. To me, I think, a certain kind of extended thought on the part of the reader is important. It's extremely difficult for me to qualify or quantify this extent. To make it more clear where I'm coming from, I can see a film qualifying as this kind of book; a lot of book art wouldn't qualify as a book, unless it's sufficiently interesting that a discussion could happen around it. A telephone book is not a book; the vast majority of what's on YouTube wouldn't be a book, though some might well qualify. To me it's not so much the extent of the book that matters – an essay would qualify – but the extent of the engagement of thought.
Birkerts isn't phrasing it in this way. He understands – very well – the opposite: the problematics of media for a short attention span. He tends to fall back on print books as the only alternative which I think isn't quite right. This is why he's taken as a Luddite. (This is also, I think, Neil Postman territory, though I haven't done as much of the reading there as I should.) But he's not arguing for old technology in favor of new, or against new technology: he's arguing for a specific way of thinking. I think this is important and worth preserving as we move forward. Presenting this kind of thought isn't something that comes naturally to the internet; I think this might be something we should be thinking about when we talk about networked books.
Posted by dan visel at January 12, 2007 4:57 PM