But now, Birkerts thinks, this new technology, chatty and endlessly in the know, is changing not only our reading and thinking habits, but our very selves. Human beings are so adaptable, they're sure to get with the digital program: speedy information scanning, our brains mimicking computers, all data, no deep and complicated conversions to knowledge, and no housing anymore for a soul. I think he's wrong, in large part because his idea of print culture is so shallow -- what I distill from it is a nostalgic image of a reader, arms full of fresh books from the library, ambling through the tree-lined streets of a small town to the comfy chair in a quiet room. This has never been reality, as Birkerts knows, but even as an ideal or a standard for a civilized life it's too narrow to be inspiring.

I'll begin by proving his point about adaptability. This most human of qualities is now, in Birkerts' eyes, no longer a positive trait. In adapting to new reading and writing technologies, he tells us we are leaving our souls behind.

In cultural terms, I've gone from zero to 60 mph in less than 50 years. My childhood, in post-war Munich and then in a farming village near the Czech border, lacked the following: indoor toilets, newspapers, magazines, radio, bookstores, libraries and people who minded their absence. I received two books a year, Christmas and birthday.

Cut to the U.S after my family immigrated. One of the first singers I heard on our new radio was Elvis. I was immediately smitten. Same reaction a few years later to the Beatles. I traded the "Niebelungenlied" and the Brothers Grimm for Superman, Spiderman and Nancy Drew. We got a TV. In high school, I wrote papers in long hand, until my parents bought me an Olympia manual typewriter in my senior year. In the '70s I started using an electric machine; that was followed by an electronic typewriter with a one-line screen where I could make corrections before committing the words to the paper in the carriage. I entered the computer age in 1990, and toward the end of the century, I embraced the Netscape browser, AltaVista's search engine and an e-mail address. I'm a filament on the Web, linked intricately to all the other strands, all of us part of a humming, roaming, free-associative consciousness.

There are literary Internet cheerleaders -- Bart Kosko, Robert Coover and George Landow spring to mind -- who enthusiastically endorse this progressive interactivity of minds and chips. For them, and all the young techies out there, the fully uplinked brain is a teleology devoutly to be welcomed.

Birkerts shudders. Will the solitary, meditative individual die out? Will the fully wired, electrified world have any use for the reader, the dreamer, the critic, the scholar, the poet, each grappling with complex ideas, emotions and questions in a quiet room alone? Or will the last surviving reader and writer someday close their books forever, shut off the reading lamps and fire up the screen?

I think the idea that we have to choose between the screen and the page is a false dilemma. They will co-habit, I suggest, with reading lamp and screen casting their different glows. All right, I'm anticipating Birkerts' rejoinder. We're both old enough to remember slower days, fewer media, the feel of good smooth paper slipping between our fingers. Our souls are not in danger because we've been raised by books. Our kids, however, connected since kindergarten, are closer to that fantasy of being uplinked, (or, if you prefer, that nightmare of being brainwashed and reprogrammed.) If Birkerts is right, they'll be going too fast to actually read anything.

History, however, does not bear out his argument. I agree with Birkerts that our consciousness is undergoing a shift, but it is not unprecedented, as he maintains. In his essay "The Millennial Warp" he offers as evidence the testimony of "older people" who tell him that things felt different in the past. "Although changes came steadily in the old days too (new inventions, changes in the workplace) and sometimes with unexpected force (the Depression, the war), the line of continuity was never ruptured." According to Birkerts, before the Internet age began, we had always retained a connection to the past and used it to relate new information to old in order to arrive at some meaningful knowledge.

Birkerts, the pessimistic humanist, is as wrong to think that we are being utterly transformed by technology as the optimistic net-heads like Kosko are to think that we will be made into a new kind of creature. The truth is that history accommodates ruptures here and there while also just, well, continuing. Ways of doing and thinking rearrange themselves; at every moment or epoch the very old and the very new co-exist. Maybe, to use Stanley Fish's term for how humans manage all manner of inconsistencies and paradoxes, history works by "inspired ad-hoccery." In other words, the Internet will not replace the printed book, just as the alphabet did not drive out the image, nor the printed book destroy religion.

The fear of radical supersession that Birkerts speaks for today has an ancient history. According to Plato, when Hermes showed pharaoh his new invention, writing, pharaoh worried that this technology would destroy the individual memory. Geoffrey Nunberg, in his introduction to the 1996 anthology "The Future of the Book," sensibly reminds us that the past is full of "an unbroken stream of proclamations that man is living in an epochal moment." In that context, Birkerts is just the latest in a traditional line of prophets of the exceptional present, ceaselessly proclaiming "never before" or "never again."

Despite Birkerts' warnings that hypertext, speed and instantaneousness are destroying resonance, depth and contour, I think the human mind, for all its nimble adaptivity, cannot do without context. True, sometimes we just want a bit of information, but more often we want the stream of information to cohere. Computers can arrange and correlate huge amounts of data, make any number of info-assemblages in response to a curious search. But only the mind of the seeker will be able to breathe a life of meaning into them. Only someone who wants to make sense of things would be asking in the first place.

In his 1999 book, "Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything," James Gleick offers Terry Gilliam's 1985 movie "Brazil" as a likelier example of what the future will look like. Gilliam "created a glittery, sinister future filled with ancient technology -- pneumatic tubes, teletype machines, desk spikes. The effect was a dark hodgepodge of the antique and the futuristic -- perfect, because when the future does come creeping in, this is how it looks. It is not shiny and gleaming, neatly assembled in clean shrink-wrap. It comes all mixed up like a junkyard, the old and the new jumbled together."

Reading "Faster", it occurred to me that the major historical and conceptual rupture Birkerts describes isn't the current communications revolution. It happened in our grandparents' childhood, at the end of the 19th century when wristwatches became available. That's when our ideas of time and speed changed radically. Accurate, standardized time measurement led to railroad schedules, assembly lines, efficiency experts and global synchronization, to name a few items on a list that could go on for pages.

The wristwatch, which gave constant access to the time on a individual basis, also made it necessary to do something about it. We spend time, waste it, save it, manage it, have come to believe that if we don't use it, we lose it. Time is now a commodity; if we invest it well we'll get big returns. So both Birkerts and I and everyone who still sits down with a book are also watch-wearing members of a society racing against the clock. The personal computer just continues that tradition.

Birkerts also bemoans the loss of a core individual identity, the kind of identity that deep reading is founded upon, in the expanding electronic hive. I question his assumption that we ever really had such a thing, even in the good old days. Malleability is part of our very nature as human beings, and a self is not a unity but a mixture; each is many. One can be a loving wife and a neglectful mother, a mob hit man who's Catholic and pro-life. One can believe in God and the explanations of physics. If you're a Freudian, you're at the very least a trinity of id, ego and superego. I think the notion of an authentic single self, expressed in such clichis as "being yourself" and "finding out who you really are" are modern myths. If we're finicky about orderliness, we can try to integrate all our personalities, incompatible ideas, rhetorical styles; or we can accept the ad-hoccery of our mental and emotional makeup and learn to live with human muttness.

As I visit online journals and magazines, and the informal discussion groups formed around specific interests, it seems to me that, contrary to Birkerts' denunciations of the medium's senseless babble, the Web is reviving the art of intelligent conversation. Like intellectual Paris in the Enlightenment, or New York in the Partisan Review's heyday, the virtual city is fizzing with bright talk. It is like visiting Madame de Stael's salon to discuss German philosophy, and then finishing the evening at a Greenwich Village party with the likes of Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson. If the people who love books today often feel isolated in a world smitten with mass media, then how can a medium that brings them together to share and foster that love possibly be inimical to literature?

Passionate readers often make for passionate writers, and vice versa. E-mail has evolved, for many of us, beyond business notes or forwarded jokes, to genuine letters. I write and receive a great many more of them now than I did 10 years ago. (But here again, the new hasn't muscled out the old; I have no intention of giving up my fountain pen and good stationery.) Casual pen pals turn into friends, and old friends who live in far-flung regions are still close.

Can the culture of the book really be dying as Birkerts insists? Perhaps in some cases it is, and perhaps that's not always a bad thing. Certain kinds of books, like travel and restaurant guides, almanacs, perhaps dictionaries, encyclopedias and other reference works -- all the categories that need constant updating -- might well migrate into cyberlibraries. The book as artifact will probably have a diminished role. There will be beautiful, hard-bound editions of certain genres like art books and literary classics. The coffee-table book will certainly continue to be produced.

For everything else, I predict, or at least fervently hope, that we will be downloading texts into e-books. Once you let go of an atavistic attachment to paper for its own sake, it makes a lot of sense. College students will be grateful not to have to buy all those textbooks, as will devotees of mysteries and romance novels. True, the current e-book models are not friendly to readers like Birkerts and me who like to turn pages. But MIT scientists are close to realizing an electronic book "comprised of hundreds of electronically addressable display pages printed on real paper substrates. Such pages may be typeset in situ, thus giving such a book the capability to be any book." ["The Last Book," IBM Systems Journal] The spine might have a small display and several buttons that would call up a card catalog. The last book, or "reversible hardcopy medium" as it's called in technical parlance, will eventually be the world's greatest text storehouse, a single-volume library that could easily accommodate the holdings of the Library of Congress and more.

What Birkerts doesn't address is how, increasingly, the paper-and-ink publishing industry, by virtue of its economic structure, is far from literature's best friend. If big changes are coming, they may not be for the worse. As Steven Levy gleefully speculates in the Jan. 1 Newsweek, "When publishers no longer have to focus on moving pulped forests to distributors, the business model will go bananas." When books are published and ordered or rented online, there won't be all those remaindered tree products to worry about, and publishers could well become more willing to gamble on literary works with smaller audiences.

When Birkerts talks about the deep-reading experience, that immersion that feels timeless yet somehow linked to an accessible past, I know what he means. But I also think he's romanticizing and he's making a fetish of language by identifying it with a certain printed form. The word is not the book; why should it die if that particular house is remade?

And consider this thought-provoking analogy in an essay called "The Talmud and the Internet" by Jonathan Rosen (you can find it in "The Art of the Essay 1999" edited by Phillip Lopate). "I have often thought, contemplating a page of the Talmud, that it bears a certain resemblance to a home page on the Internet, where nothing is whole in itself but where icons and text boxes are doorways through which visitors pass into an infinity of cross-referenced texts and conversations." A single page of text in this most revered and literary of documents is already a historical, multilayered compendium and a continuing discussion. There are stories, bits of history, anthropology, legal disputes, biblical interpretation, plus the commentaries, corrections, asides, marginalia, reinterpretations of generations of scholars and rabbis.

The e-book will allow us the best of the old and new ways of reading. We can read "Huckleberry Finn" or "The Duino Elegies" from beginning to end and then close the book, experiencing it as a whole in itself, a finite world in which we have dwelled for a while. But why not then open the windows and doors to other texts and voices? Perhaps it's time for romantic readers to give up the illusion of closure and finitude. After all, only the printed book-object is a finite text; every writing is part of a conversation with other writings, past and present. The "last book" will widen the contextual space in which reading takes place, and beautifully complicate its resonances. That's a complex richness devoutly to be welcomed by friends of the book.