Guttenburg Elegies

A detailed Summary of Guttenburg Elegies

The Gutenberg Elegies is not only about the loss of the printed word, but of books, literature, reading, history, culture, language, sensibility, the past, community, faith, the self and the soul. Responsible for their unfortunate extinction is technology, or so Birkert says.

Birkerts is out to speak up for the act of reading, to stand by the printed book, and to defend the literary culture that books and reading created. Reading, the book, and literary culture are put in jeopardy, not only by electronic mass media, but also by the digitization and electronic manipulation of the written word and by its electronic transmission.

I would like to suggest two reasons why the book is off. First, his rehash of electronic media is painted with too broad of a brush. The differences between these media's are ignored. When he discusses reading he specifically declares that he is not

The Gutenberg Elegies is an argument against forms of communication that mediate our relationship to the written word. However, the written word is itself a technological mediation of the highest order. When Birkerts talks about technology he seems to mean only increasingly sophisticated machinery. Acting on his convictions, he tells us that he produced the manuscript of this book on an IBM Selectric. (Page 28)

As anyone knows who has experienced them both, broadcast media like radio and television are much different then point-to-point interactive media like computer-mediated-communication. Video, audio, and multimedia forms of electronic media are vastly different then the primarily text transmissions that constitute most of the traffic on the Internet. E-mail is nothing like television. Generalizing across all of these forms of media short-circuits the argument.

The second problem that undercut

Some common words found in the essay are:
Birkert Birkerts, Internet E-mail, Gutenberg Elegies, Selectric Page, written word, electronic media, gutenberg elegies, evolutionary miracle, literary culture, growth technology, language technology,

Approximate Word count = 616
Approximate Pages = 2 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Miscellaneous

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