In his essay, Birkerts strongly spotlights his view on wisdom and where it comes from. Birkerts states that wisdom comes from resonance – which is obtained through “deep time”. A modern human in gradually going downhill with the help of new circuit driven technology. An idea of wisdom being outgained from the facts and general information, is being overthrown by Birkerts, and not only that… His main destiny that he wants the reader to achieve is that: human are expanding in knowledge, they are being informed of all these bits and pieces that they might inhale from mass media and other sources that surround us everywhere, with that “access with ease” theme to them, our understanding is just floating on the surface without actually implanting anywhere. The understanding that human get is so light and very general but it sure is mass in the linear expansion: reaching the point where “quantity is elevated over quality”! And unlike, it can be obtained from his example with the villager Vs. the modern television viewer, the reader that has his hands on the written material he dwells in it and studies every corner of the room that was once in the dark. Creating the scene of not only the horizontal but the vertical inscription that can be stored. The villager also depends on his memory because the access to the phenomenal information that was gathered might not be eternal. But likewise just what Birkerts said: “We depend far less on memory: that faculty has all but atrophied from the lack of use.”
Although Birkerts does not say so directly, he apparently assumes that not all of the modern human society, but most, is in the trap of “intensively” reading which is when a reader has access to so many books that he can grow in and dig out knowledge due to the book pricing on the current market. Although he stated clearly that we might read a lot but what we read is just tiny bits and generalizations of and event or a happening, and that sort of information in is a such mass quantity that “when everything is happening everywhere, it gets hard to care about anything”.
By: Timofey Grebenyuk
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