reading resp. #3

I think Birkert’s project in “The Owl Has Flown” is Birkert reaching out to everyone and letting society know what he believes is happening with knowledge, wisdom, and the understanding of text and how it operates. Birkert backs his theory up with very convincing facts known throughout the past. A quote I chose was, “we know from historians, for example, that before seventh century there were few who read silently (writing some centuries before, Saint Augustine professed astonishment that Saint Ambrose read without moving his lips); that in Europe in the late Middle Ages and after, designated readers often entertained or edified groups at social or work-related gatherings. I think what he is trying to convince readers to believe is not to harshly persuade someone into following in agreement with him but to make readers choose on their own in what they think and share those personal opinions with each other. Here is my paraphrase that I think exemplifies what Birkert wants you to think about when you read his text.
How are we to obtain both the rights and wrongs of so many different media we come across and what is the “right” material in both horizontal and vertical awareness? A townsman knows all the ins and outs of his town but not of great cities in foreign lands. I mean news of a really old earthquake in Lisbon took months to travel across Europe, and I have no clue where that is but it sounds far.
This passage appears on page 31 about half way through the essay when he gives what I think is a great example. This passage lets me sort of realize how information like the news way back when news traveled from man to man. This example introduces a new view for readers to see things and helped me understand this essay more clearly. This essay I think is related to what we were talking about in class when we read and watched Qualman and Thompsons work. How they both talk about changes in history whether it was way in the past or scarily close, how both are amplifying that the change is constant and will further continue. And also how we were are and continue to be an advancing interconnected network of man and machine.