Reading Response 3: "The Owl Has Flown"

In the essay “The Owl Has Flown” the author Sven Birkets project is telling readers how our reading today is lacking or losing depth, wisdom, and resonance. By saying the Owl has flown he is relating the owl to wisdom and that wisdom is leaving our reading and writing these days. Right now are reading is fast and easy, we don’t go in depth like readers used to. Readers used to analyze the text and get hidden means from it, and really think about it. Now we read and want to finish it in a hurry. We read for the now everything today is we want it now and it needs to be fast.
What Sven Birkets is advocating is that we don’t forget or lose the depth, wisdom, and resonance in our reading and writing. He wants us to see how valuable it is and that we should start using it again. He also wants us to remember the impact of depth, wisdom, and resonance. With those three items your thinking and reading improves and you comprehend more instead of just thinking you know something. Sven Birkets wants us to be aware that our writing and reading is being shifted from vertical to horizontal. When we were on the vertical axis we thought more in depth and focused more on one topic now all we think about it knowing bits and pieces of different information and knowing lots of different things not just comprehending a couple different sources.
“That centrifugal tendency has of course escalated right into our present, prompted as much by the expansion of higher education and the demands of social and professional commerce as by the astronomical increase in the quality of available print. Newspapers, magazines, brochures, advertisements, and labels surround us everywhere- surround us, indeed, to the point of having turned our waking environment into a palimpsest of texts to be read, glanced at, or ignored.” Said Sven Birkets. In this passage I believe he is telling us that the increase of different texts is making our reading and writing lacking. Because of so many different text we are just glancing at them instead of reading them in depth like we used to. Technology is helping us lose sight of what texts are important and which texts are not. Only the highly educated are still reading and writing on the vertical axis. The highly educated are still using depth, wisdom, and resonance in the reading and writing.
The passage I chose is closer to the beginning of essay where he is describing how people used to read and talking about different writers and readers. Then he goes into today and how people read and write today. The passage is showing us readers how far from depth, wisdom, and resonance we are today and why we are coming so far from it. This part of the essay is setting up for other arguments and other points later on in the text. It is important because we see what different texts are affecting our ways of reading and writing this particular passage helps me understand the essay be comparing to the ways we used to read and write instead of the ways today we read and write.
In “The New Literacy” by Clive Thompson the author describes how technology is pushing us forward and we use technology for different forms of writing and reading. In “The Owl Has Flown” Sven Birkets talks about how our reading and writing has changed because of new texts and how they are not being read as in depth as they used to be. Both articles are talking about how times are changing and today we are not as in depth in reading and writing as we used to be. It is important to accept change but also remember and still use the techniques of the past. I think Clive Thompson would respond to Sven Birkets by saying you can still be in depth with technology today and still use wisdom and resonance when reading articles off the internet or using different texts toady.