The Owl Has Flown

In the paper The Owl Has Flown, Sven Birkerts goes over the idea that the modern day technologies and life styles has made for a loss in depth and wisdom. Birkerts says, “We are experiencing in our times a loss of depth—a loss, that is, of the very paradigm of depth. A sense of the seep and natural connectedness of things is a function of vertical consciousness.” This passage for the most part gets Birkets biggest point out, that our culture is becoming shallower and appreciating the ability for deep thought less.
An interesting thing is that when Birkets makes a good claim that technology is killing depth, Clive Thompson brings up equally legitimate contrary ideas. Clive Thompson wrote an article The New Literacy and in it he shows how this paradigm shift may be a good thing. Technology has increased the amount of text produced out side of the classroom significantly. This is because of chat rooms and web sites like face book and twitter. Thompson even argues that this technology has taken us back to the age of argument in ancient Grease. On the other hand Birkerts says that, “ We direct our energies to managing information. The computer, our high-speed, accessing, storing, and sorting tool, appears as a godsend. It increasingly determines what kind of information we are willing to traffic in…” He points out that all the information on-line gets to be too much, to the point where we no longer sit and think, but try sorting out the good from the bad.
Both sides bring up reasonable claims; I think that they both have some truth. I see how the Internet can be almost a cheat to get information, a way to know stuff with out having to think. It encourages shallow communication and pushes away time to sit and think. Thompson’s argument also is reasonable, the more you write the better you become. The better you are at writing the deeper you can become. Plus, every day people can get their ideas and opinions out, before the Internet getting you ideas out was nearly impossible unless you worked in the media or were an author.
In the end it is hard to know what is better, life before or after technology. It hurts by enabling bleat and shallow conversation and limited time for resonance. It makes education almost meaningless when in five seconds you can have an answer form your iphone. But it also has made writing a more commonly practiced thing that helps individual thought and idea to be shared and contemplated. But certainly technology has started one of the biggest paradigm shifts ever.