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"Being Dead" by Jim Crace
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[03/29/00]

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By Steven M. Zeitchik
[03/28/00]

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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.

The Future of the Book Salon examines how the digital revolution is changing what and how we read.   Read also: Brave new e-books We've seen the future of publishing, and the wrong people are freaking out. By Craig Offman   The revolution that wasn't Stephen King's e-book success proves that the new boss will be the same as the old. By Steven M. Zeitchik

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.

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