Birkert group work summary

In his essay Birkerts suggests that as the quantity of available print increases, a broader knowledge is required for a higher education. Today we have newspapers, magazines, brochures, advertisements, and labels among all kinds of other things that all serve the same purpose, to give us information about any given topic. Birkerts claims that having all of this information available has taken us to the point where we skim over, glance at, or even ignore a text completely.

He uses the analogy of a “cultural watershed” to explain this idea. As where you would have to go to the water hole in the old days, we know have water flowing into every home through an underground system. This can be related to how we receive information as where in the old days you might have to go to the church or a library to receive texts, but today we have television and the internet that are constantly available to anyone almost anywhere. Birkerts implies that this diminishes the value of what we are reading and changes the way we process. We have all this information but what makes this important to us? Why read in depth about everything when I can just skim the title and introduction for the main ideas?

Birkerts uses the terms vertical and horizontal reading to describe these concepts. By horizontal reading he means having a vast knowledge of many things but with little depth or understanding of each topic. By vertical reading he means reading into a topic exclusively and gaining a greater in depth understanding of it. He uses terms to describe vertical reading such as “prison” or “desert island” reading. This emphasizes that there is little availability of text so you read what you have over and over. But with such a vast array of information available to us today many of us are choosing to be horizontal readers.