Prognostications?
(Taken from Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies, 1994)

A change is upon us—nothing could be clearer. The printed word is part of a vestigial order that we are moving away from—by choice and by societal compulsion. . . . This shift is happening throughout our culture, away from patterns and habits of the printed word and towards a new world distinguished by its reliance on electronic communication.

Many educators say that our students are less and less able to read, or analyze, or write with clarity and purpose. Who can blame the students? Everything they meet with in the world around them gives them the signal: That was then, and electronic communications are now.

What oral poetry was for the Greeks, printed books in general are for us. But our historical moment, what we might call “proto-electronic,” will not require a transition period of two centuries. The very essence of electronic transmissions is to surmount impedances and to hasten transitions. Fifty years, I’m sure, will suffice.

The order of print is linear, and is bound to logic by the imperatives of syntax. Syntax is the substructure of discourse, a mapping of the ways that the mind makes sense through language. Print communication requires the active engagement of the reader’s attention, for reading is fundamentally an act of translation. . . . The electronic order is in most ways opposite. Information and content do not simply move from one private state to another, but they travel along a network. Engagement is intrinsically public, taking place within a circuit of larger connectedness. . . . Electronic communication can be passive, as with television watching, or interactive, as with computers. Contents . . . are felt to be evanescent. They can be changed or deleted with a stroke of a key. . . . The pace is rapid . . . and basically movement is laterally associative rather than vertically cumulative. The presentation structures the reception and, in time, the expectation about how information is organized [bullet points?].

Transitions like the one from print to electronic media do not take place without rippling or more likely, reweaving the entire social and cultural web.

Tag-line communication, called “bite-speak” by some, is destroying the last remnants of political discourse; spin doctors and media consultants are our new shamans.

And here are some of the kinds of developments we might watch out for as our “proto-electronic” era yields to an all-electronic future:
1. Language erosion. There is no question but that the transition from the culture of the book to the culture of electronic communication will radically alter the ways in which we use language on every societal level. The complexity and distinctiveness of spoken and written expression, which are deeply bound to traditions of print literacy, will gradually be replaced by a more telegraphic sort of “plainspeak.” . . . Simple linguistic prefab is now the norm, while ambiguity, paradox, irony, subtlety, and wit are fast disappearing. . . . Language will grow increasingly impoverished through a series of vicious cycles . . . We can expect that curricula will be further streamlined, and difficult texts in the humanities will be pruned and glossed. . . . Fewer and fewer people will be able to contend with the so-called masterworks of literature or ideas.
2. Flattening of historical perspective. As the circuit supplants the printed page, and as more and more of our communications involve us in network processes . . . our perception of history will inevitable alter. Changes in information storage and access are bound to impinge on our historical memory. . . . The database, useful as it is, expunges this [historical] context, this sense of chronology, and admits us to a weightless order in which all information is equally accessible. . . . For, naturally, the entertainment industry . . . will seize the advantage. The past that has slipped away will be rendered ever more glorious, ever more a fantasy play with heroes, villains, and quaint settings and props. Small-town American life returns as :”Andy of Mayberry”—at first enjoyed with recognition, then later accepted as a faithful portrait of how things used to be.
3. The waning of the private self. We may even now be in the first stages of a process of social collectivization that will over time all but vanquish the ideal of the isolated individual. For some decades now we have been edging away from the perception of private life as something opaque, closed off to the world. . . . I am not suggesting that we are all about to become mindless, soulless robots, or that personality will disappear altogether into an oceanic homogeneity. But certainly the idea of what it means to be a person living a life will be much changed. The figure-ground model, which has always featured a solitary self before a background that is the society of other selves, is romantic in the extreme. It is ever less tenable in the world as it is becoming.

Speculations:

The Age of Print is rapidly drawing to a close. We have already entered into a new age of electronic communication and cyber space is revolutionizing the ways we live our lives, particularly in the ways we interact and communicate. We are not only constantly connected to each other, but we, as human beings, are developing whole new ways of socializing. Quite often we are closer to people one hundred miles away, if not a thousand or more miles away, than we are to those living next to us.

Friendship and love are now as much virtual online phenomena as they are physical realities.

Being wired is already becoming more important than being literate in the traditional sense. An entire new form of electronic literacy is developing at a lightning-quick pace.

The body of literate (or literary) readers is rapidly shrinking. Reading books, as we understand the process, will become an outdated—if not obsolete—skill.

Most students today are considerable less comfortable reading than students a generation ago, even a few years ago. They read less, and they understand less of what they read. They have been trained to skim, searching for the bulleted lists and images. They would generally rather watch a video than read a text.

These same students are much more comfortable with computer screens than with books. They are much more comfortable interpreting visual images and icons than textual descriptions. They have been trained to think in images rather than in deep contemplation.

These students are going to take over the world.

We are rapidly developing a new form of hieroglyphics. Emoticons are becoming wildly popular.

We are rapidly developing new electronic dialects through text messaging—OMG!

The concept of reading is undergoing a drastic transformation. In the near future nearly all reading will take place on computer screens or on Kindle-like apparatuses. What will constitute reading will take place in shorter and shorter durations, and in shorter and shorter forms. Readers will scan for highlighted bits, bytes, and bullets of information.

Students categorically prefer to research online rather than in libraries.

The concept of literacy is undergoing a drastic transformation. If there is a new Dark Ages, the dividing line between the ignorant masses and the enlightened few will be technological knowledge, not humanistic knowledge.

The means through which we receive information wholly affects the way we process that information.

We are losing our capacity to use language in skillful and subtle ways.

Eventually, English departments will be merged into History departments and eventually go the way of Philosophy departments. Libraries will become museums.