Attention Conservation Notice: This is a long stream in an unordered distributed debate. It may not make much sense unless you’ve read the discussion that is taking place on various websites indicated in the following paragraphs. There are many strands in the conversation. The one I am following here is about whether books will be dethroned from their centrality in culture.

Nick Carr is the current smart critic of the new. He is articulate and informed, which is why his worry about the decline of book-thinking gets a hearing. But a decade and a half ago there was another articulate critic of the rising internet who similarly yearned to protect the superior, but endangered book. That critic was Sven Birkerts. He even wrote a book about the waning of the book called “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age”.

Fast-forward to 2008. Carr’s provocative Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” generated a lot of responses, including a previous post by me. Danny Hillis weighed in with some incredibly cogent insights focused on why we need so much info, which brought more responses on John Brockman’s Edge. Here George Dyson noted that maybe the elevated stature of books was over. Carr favors the bookish Encyclopedia Britannica (EB) over the webby Wikipedia, and since he advises the EB leadership, another round of discussion about his article was jump started on the EB forum. Among those summoned by this lively discussion was Clay Shirky and Sven Birkerts, who addressed the fate of books. The collective discussion of books vs. web reminded me of a face to face conversation between myself and Sven Birkerts, John Barlow, and Mark Slouka on this very topic thirteen years ago. The sides were Barlow and Kelly for embracing net versus Birkerts and Slouka for refusing it. The conversation was edited and published as “What are we doing on-line?” in Harper’s Magazine, August 1995. Because today’s debate is an echo of so many points raised then, and because Birkerts might have said the same points better, I think this excerpt is worth resurrecting.

A note on context. The original discussion included four speakers covering much ground over an afternoon. Harpers’ editor Paul Tough’s reduction of that discussion to ten pages omitted appropriate responses to questions raised, skipped over important qualifications, and slipped things out of context – as it rightly had to in order to squeeze it into a magazine. I have further severed some the remaining context by abbreviating the text to these excerpts. I indicate intra-speaker snips with ellipses. You can buy an official PDF of the full forum here. Or you can see a crummy free version missing the last three pages here.

And then there is the unrecoverable context of the times in mid 1990s. This forum took place at a point when the web had just been born. The internet referred to here is text-based – no images, no sound, all ascii characters. Users watched as light text on dark screen scrolled up. Email accounts were uncommon. Very few computers were connected. They stood alone. No handhelds, virtually no cell phones. To get on the internet was a chore, and it was a very small place.

BIRKERTS: The last two words in my book are “Refuse it.” I don’t mean that this is necessarily a realistic mass proposal. I mean that speaking subjectively, for myself, this is what my heart tells me to do…In living my own life, what seems most important to me is focus, a lack of distraction — an environment that engenders a sustained and growing awareness of place, and face-to-face interaction with other people. I’ve deemed these to be the primary integers of building and sustaining this self. I see this whole breaking wave, this incursion of technologies, as being in so many ways designed to pull me from that center of focus. To give you a simple example: I am sitting in the living room playing with my son. There is an envelope of silence. I am focused. The phone rings. I am brought out. When I sit down again, the envelope has been broken. I am distracted. I am no longer in that moment. I have very nineteenth-century, romantic views of the self and what it can accomplish and be. I don’t have a computer. I work on a typewriter. I don’t do e-mail. It’s enough for me to deal with mail. Mail itself almost feels like too much. I wish there were less of it and I could go about the business of living as an entity in my narrowed environment…But what I see happening instead is our wholesale wiring. And what the wires carry is not the stuff of the soul. I might feel differently if that was what they were transmitting. But it’s not. It is data. The supreme capability that this particular chip-driven silicon technology has is to transfer binary units of information. And therefore, as it takes over the world, it privileges those units of information. When everyone is wired and humming, most of what will be going through those wires is that sort of information. If it were soul-data, that might be a different thing, but soul-data doesn’t travel through the wires.

KELLY: I have experienced soul-data through silicon. You might be surprised at the amount of soul-data that we’ll have in this new space. That’s why what is going on now is more exciting than what was going on ten years ago. Look, computers are over. All the effects that we can imagine coming from standalone computers have already happened. What we’re talking about now is not a computer revolution, it’s a communications revolution. And communication is, of course, the basis of culture itself. The idea that this world we are building is somehow diminishing communication is all wrong. In fact, it’s enhancing communication. It is allowing all kinds of new language. Sven, there’s this idea in your book that reading is the highest way in which the soul can discover and deepen its own nature. But there is nothing I’ve seen in online experience that excludes that. In fact, when I was reading your book I had a very interesting epiphany. At one point, in an essay on the experience of reading, you ask the question, “Where am I when I am involved in a book?” Well, here’s the real answer: you’re in cyberspace. That’s exactly where you are. You’re in the same place you are when you’re in a movie theater, you’re in the same place you are when you’re on the phone, you’re in the same place you are when you’re on-line.

BIRKERTS: It’s not the same at all…When you write the word across a football stadium in skywriting, you’re not just writing the word, you’re writing the perception of the word through the air. When you’re incising a word on a tombstone, you’re not merely writing the word, you’re writing a word as incised on a tombstone. Same for the book, and same for the screen. The medium matters because it defines the arena of sentience. The screen not only carries the words, it also says that communication is nothing more than the transfer of evanescent bits across a glowing panel.

SLOUKA: But it seems to me that the kind of writing that’s done in the electronic media has a sort of evanescence to it. There’s an impermanence to it. A book, though, is something you can hold on to. It is a permanent thing. There is something else going on here, too. And that is what happens in the process of reading. When you read a book, there’s a kind of a silence. And in that silence, in the interstices between the words themselves, your imagination has room to move, to create. On-line communication is filling those spaces. We are substituting a transitional, impermanent, ephemeral communication for a more permanent one.

BARLOW: …I think that the book is pretty damn ephemeral, too. The point is not the permanence or impermanence of the created thing so much as the relationship between the creative act and the audience. The big difference between experience and information is that with an experience, you can ask questions interactively, in real time. Sven, because you’re sitting here, I can ask you questions about your book. As a reader I can’t.

BIRKERTS: But as a writer I didn’t want you to.

BARLOW: Well, you may or may not. But in order to feel the greatest sense of communication, to realize the most experience, as opposed to information, I want to be able to completely interact with the consciousness that’s trying to communicate with mine. Rapidly. And in the sense that we are now creating a space in which the people of the planet can have that kind of communication relationship, I think we’re moving away from information–through information, actually–and back toward experience.

BIRKERTS: But that wasn’t what I wanted in writing the book. The preferred medium for me is the word on the page, alone, with an implicit recognition that I’m not going to be there to gloss and elucidate and expand on it. It is what drives me, as a writer, to find the style that will best express my ideas. I would write very differently if I were typing on a terminal and my readers were out there already asking me questions. Writing a book is an act of self-limitation and, in a way, self-sublimation into language and expression and style. Style is very much a product of the print medium. …Language is our evolutionary wonder. It is our marvel. If we’re going to engage the universe, comprehend it and penetrate it, it will be through ever more refined language. The screen is a linguistic leveling device. We may be evolving on all fronts, but we only comprehend ourselves by way of language. And I think that the deep tendency of the circuited medium is to flatten language.

KELLY: Here you are wrong. If you hung out online, you’d find out that the language is not, in fact, flattening; it’s flourishing. At this point in history, most of the evolution of language, most of the richness in language, is happening in this space that we are creating. It’s not happening in novels.

BIRKERTS: I wish some of this marvelous prose could be downloaded and shown to me.

KELLY: You can’t download it. That’s the whole point. You want to download it so that you can read it like a book. But that’s precisely what it can’t be. You want it to be data, but it’s experience. And it’s an experience that you have to have there. When you go on-line, you’re not going to have a book experience.

BIRKERTS: Well, I want a book experience.

KELLY: You think that somehow a book is the height of human achievement. It is not.

SLOUKA: But there is a real decline in the kind of discourse taking place. I go back to what John said in an interview that I read not too long ago. He said that the Internet is “CB radio, only typing.” That really stuck in my mind, because there’s an incredible shallowness to most on-line communication. I realize that there are good things being said on the net, but by and large the medium seems to encourage quickness over depth, and rapid response over reflection.

KELLY: My advice would be to open your mind to the possibility that in creating cyberspace we’ve made a new space for literature and art, that we have artists working there who are as great as artists in the past. They’re working in a medium that you might dismiss right now as inconsequential, just as the theater, in Shakespeare’s day, was dismissed as outrageous and low-class and not very deep.

SLOUKA: At some point do you think the virtual world is basically going to replace the world we live in? Is it going to be an alternate space?

KELLY: No, it’s going to be an auxiliary space. There will be lots of things that will be similar to the physical world, and there will be lots of things that will be different. But it’s going to be a space that’s going to have a lot of the attributes that we like in reality–a richness, a sense of place, a place to be silent, a place to go deep.

BIRKERTS: … If we’re merely talking about this phenomenon as an interesting, valuable supplement for those who seek it, I have no problem with it. What I’m concerned by is this becoming a potentially all-transforming event that’s going to change not only how I live but how my children live. I don’t believe it’s merely going to be auxiliary. I think it’s going to be absolutely central….But even if I’ve pledged myself personally, as part of my “refuse it” package, to the old here and now, it still impinges on me, because it means I live in a world that I find to be increasingly attenuated, distracted, fanned-out, disembodied. Growing up in the Fifties, I felt I was living in a very real place. The terms of human interchange were ones I could navigate. I could get an aura buzz from living. I can still get it, but it’s harder to find. More and more of the interchanges that are being forced on me as a member of contemporary society involve me having to deal with other people through various layers of scrim, which leaves me feeling disembodied. What I’m really trying to address is a phenomenon that you don’t become aware of instantly. It encroaches on you…Maybe it’s because I’m not on-line, but it seems to me, as an adult human being living in 1995, that the signal is getting weaker. I find that more and more I navigate my days within this kind of strange landscape. People have drawn into their houses, and the shades are down. You go into a store and the clerk isn’t looking at you, he’s busy running bar codes. And you multiply that a thousandfold: mediation, mediation, mediation. I want an end to mediation. And I don’t think I can break the membrane by going on-line.

KELLY: Sven, I think part of what you’re saying is true. You’re ignoring the center of the culture, and therefore you feel sort of cut off. The culture has shifted to a new medium. But it’s not going to be the only medium there is. The introduction of fire produced great changes in our society. That doesn’t mean that everything is on fire. Digital technologies and the net can have a great effect without meaning that everything has to be the net. I listen to books on tape. I have for many years. I couldn’t live without them. I listen to the radio. I read books. I read magazines. I write letters. All of these things are not going to go away when the net comes.

BIRKERTS: But don’t you think it’s a push-pull model? If you send out a net that allows you to be in touch with all parts of the globe, you may well get a big bang out of doing that, but you can’t do that and then turn around and look at your wife in the same way. The psyche is a closed system. If you spread yourself laterally, you sacrifice depth.

KELLY: I question that trade-off. That’s my whole point about this kind of environment. It’s not that we’re going to deduct the book, though the book will certainly lose its preeminence. The flourishing of digital communication will enable more options, more possibilities, more diversity, more room, more frontiers. Yes, that will close off things from the past, but that is a choice I will accept.

SLOUKA: See, the confusion is understandable because so much of the hype surrounding the digital revolution revolves around this issue of inevitability.

KELLY: But it is inevitable.

SLOUKA: Well, which is it? Is it inevitable or isn’t it?

KELLY: It’s inevitable that the net will continue to grow, to get bigger, to get more complex, to become the dominant force in the culture. That is inevitable. What’s not inevitable is what you choose to do about it.

SLOUKA: So I have the option of being marginalized?

KELLY: That’s right. You can be like the Amish. Noble, but marginal.

BIRKERTS: …We are being forced to adapt by a pressing social consensus that seems to say that if you don’t have “x” you’re out of the loop. You’re going to be marginalized in your workplace. If I don’t have a disk to send my articles in to a journal, I feel like there’s a problem. If I don’t have a fax machine, I’m losing business. If I don’t have a phone-answering machine, God knows what might happen. The attitude is, “If you’re not on the bus then forget it, man. You’re just rooting around for potatoes.” I don’t want to be forced into that either/or. I want to be able to say, “Let me think about it.” Maybe in ten years I’ll get a fax machine. I don’t want to feel that if I’m not receiving a fax every second I am no longer existing in the cultural community in which I want to exist.

BARLOW: …I’ve watched what has happened to my own community, where I still live, my little town in Wyoming, as a re-suit of broadcast media. I see what happened to that culture as soon as the satellite dishes bloomed in the backyards. And it has been devastating.

BIRKERTS: You don’t see cyberspace as the extension of the satellite dish?

BARLOW: Absolutely not. If you had experienced this to any large extent, if you had been around it in the way that Kevin and I have, you would see that it is absolutely antithetical to the satellite.

KELLY: I wasn’t joking when I said that when you’re reading a book, you’re in cyberspace. Being in cyberspace is much closer to reading a book than it is to watching TV. A lot of the things you seem to be looking for in the culture of the book, Sven, can actually be found in the culture of the screen.

A decade later I stand by my point that we should resist the idea that the book is the apex of human culture. It seems likely we’ll soon invent other forms of media that take what the book has done and do it better. Maybe someday books may not be central to our culture or identity. I don’t think a desirable bookless world is hard to imagine. It could be a very oral society, where the spoken word regains some the stature it lost when printing came along. At one time not too long ago some people thought that replacement media was television. That seems laughable now. So when some fans today say the web may raise to the level where books once soared, it seems just as laughable. But I think it is too early to laugh.

As books as we know them wane, there is a deep sense of loss among those who love them. Unlike Clay Shirky, I have read the unabridged “War and Peace”, and was awed by it. The book kept getting deeper and deeper as the pages piled up, and I really would not mind reading it again. It deserves the respect it gets, but it does not deserve to be shielded from change. I work on my computer in a two-story library surrounded by books. I am acutely aware of the shift our media is undergoing.

I thought that Sven Birkerts summed up our collective concern about the internet in this perfect one line of poetry from the Harper’s conversation: “If you touch all parts of the globe, you can’t do that and then turn around and look at your wife in the same way.”  However the literary tone of Birkerts’ nostalgia implies regret: that we should be unhappy to alter our perspective of our own family. Or it implies that the new perspective is, without questioning, an undesirable one. But we could just as easily imagine the experience of contacting the rest of the world as a process that enhances our view of our spouse.  ” I have touched all parts of the globe and now I see my wife differently.” But this possibility is not suggested by Birkerts’ wonderfully crafted line of poetry. Instead his koan contains an inherent conservativism in which any change is assumed to be negative.

Imagine my surprise then to see Sven Birkerts hanging out online in the EB forum. I hope he did not get a fax ten years later but they were pretty useless by then. It looks like he is using a computer and not a typewriter, posting to internet forums. Instead of refusing it, he has embraced it.

My question, then, is framed as a question for Sven, as the reprenstative of the worried: Sven, now that you have embraced the internet do you look at your wife in the same way?  This is a serious question. I have been on/in the internet so long so deep I can’t remember what it was like off it, just as I can’t remember not reading. You are deeply attuned to the hidden biases in this media, and very self-aware, and recently on (unless I am mistaken).  Has the manner in the way you view your wife been changed by embracing the web? If so, in what ways?

UPDATE: Sven Birkerts eloquent reply is posted here.