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Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age
Trenchant, expansive essays on the cultural consequences of ongoing, all-permeating technological innovation
In 1994, Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies , his celebrated rallying cry to resist the oncoming digital advances, especially those that might affect the way we read literature and experience art―the very cultural activities that make us human.
After two decades of rampant change, Birkerts has allowed a degree of everyday digital technology into his life. He refuses to use a smartphone, but communicates via e-mail and spends some time reading online. In Changing the Subject , he examines the changes that he observes in himself and others―the distraction when reading on the screen; the loss of personal agency through reliance on GPS and one-stop information resources; an increasing acceptance of "hive" behaviors. "An unprecedented shift is underway," he argues, and "this transformation is dramatically accelerated and more psychologically formative than any previous technological innovation." He finds solace in engagement with art, particularly literature, and he brilliantly describes the countering energy available to us through acts of sustained attention, even as he worries that our increasingly mediated existences are not conducive to creativity.
It is impossible to read Changing the Subject without coming away with a renewed sense of what is lost by our wholesale acceptance of digital innovation and what is regained when we immerse ourselves in a good book.
In 1994, Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies , his celebrated rallying cry to resist the oncoming digital advances, especially those that might affect the way we read literature and experience art―the very cultural activities that make us human.
After two decades of rampant change, Birkerts has allowed a degree of everyday digital technology into his life. He refuses to use a smartphone, but communicates via e-mail and spends some time reading online. In Changing the Subject , he examines the changes that he observes in himself and others―the distraction when reading on the screen; the loss of personal agency through reliance on GPS and one-stop information resources; an increasing acceptance of "hive" behaviors. "An unprecedented shift is underway," he argues, and "this transformation is dramatically accelerated and more psychologically formative than any previous technological innovation." He finds solace in engagement with art, particularly literature, and he brilliantly describes the countering energy available to us through acts of sustained attention, even as he worries that our increasingly mediated existences are not conducive to creativity.
It is impossible to read Changing the Subject without coming away with a renewed sense of what is lost by our wholesale acceptance of digital innovation and what is regained when we immerse ourselves in a good book.
256 pages, Paperback
First published October 6, 2015
27 people are currently reading
651 people want to read
About the author
Sven Birkerts
59 books82 followersSven Birkerts is an American essayist and literary critic of Latvian ancestry. He is best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies, which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the "electronic culture."
Birkerts graduated from Cranbrook School and then from the University of Michigan in 1973. He has taught writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, Amherst College, and most recently at Mount Holyoke College. Birkerts is the Director of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and the editor of AGNI, the literary journal. He now lives in the Boston area, specifically Arlington, Massachusetts, with his wife Lynn, daughter Mara, and son Liam.
His father is noted architect Gunnar Birkerts.
Birkerts graduated from Cranbrook School and then from the University of Michigan in 1973. He has taught writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, Amherst College, and most recently at Mount Holyoke College. Birkerts is the Director of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and the editor of AGNI, the literary journal. He now lives in the Boston area, specifically Arlington, Massachusetts, with his wife Lynn, daughter Mara, and son Liam.
His father is noted architect Gunnar Birkerts.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
September 26, 2015
The best book I've read thus far this year. A truly beautiful book. I was enraptured from the opening page. CHANGING THE SUBJECT is a cultural critique that is masterfully assembled. It is a philosophical examination of our understanding of value and aesthetics in the digital age. As our digital advancements have accelerated at an unquestioned pace, Birkerts argues that, we have lost our most human ability to connect and engage with the material world in a way that encourages the appreciation and perception of the beautiful. Birkerts' prose is both powerful and jarring, and challenges the reader to investigate their digital consumption and its supposed merits. At the heart of the book is a soulful, energizing, account of the effect reading quality literature has on one's spirit. I wish that everyone who values ink on paper, as they value scratches on vinyl, would read this book as it demonstrates the true worth of the beautiful physical object. From the text: "For a record store is not just a place to get records, as a bookstore is not only for finding the needed read. These are sites where the love of music and literature announce themselves across the spectrum of tastes. And though they are commercial entities, these emporiums also symbolize the presence, the value, of their product to the community." I cannot express how much I loved this book. It had a profoundly spiritual effect on me, and it is one that I will come back to for years and years to come. Graywolf Press has, once again, struck gold with this essay. #GraywolfPrESSAY
December 30, 2016
If I’m reading Sven Birkets right, the current insistence that we have irreversibly transitioned into some unprecedented age of creative industry carried on by the most broadly aware generation yet engendered is just so much wishful thinking. In illustration, he cites Virginia Woolf and her well-traveled reaction to a recent exhibition of post-impressionist painting in London: “On or about December 1910” Ms. Woolf wrote, “human character changed.” Art had, with a single radical thrust, reshaped the entirety of human consciousness. Yep, sure.
If only it were that simple. If only the type of broad-scale, unifying psychic awakening that allows us to functionally and readily sidestep our flawed humanity were possible, the means, the method – mechanical, chemical, psychological – wouldn’t much matter. And this quasi-millennial longing for singularities that could just set right everything that is wrong with the world is nearly as ubiquitous as it is irresistible: a radio signal from a distant planet encoded with the secret to free, non-polluting, renewable energy; the discovery that trans fats promote deeper spirituality; a bullet for Putin. To each his dreams, each as instantaneous as it is ephemeral.
But Birkets would argue that change, though pervasive, is of a far more deliberate character, lending both to its tentative character and to our hesitant acceptance of it. For as much as the microchip has changed the world, it has truly changed very little. His is not some irrationally stubborn luddite perspective (despite his ready, and reasonable, dismissal of the “indispensability” of digital technologies), but the compelling insistence that, despite the changes our world is undergoing, our core humanity is what it always has been, its urges and aches as they have been. We are a tactile, sensate, localized species. Were, are, will be.
And yet a new technology – much like a radiation leak – marked by intangible, the insensate, and the seemingly universal, is bringing on an anxiety born of substantive, quantifiable change. Information culture would now offer us those adventures and advantages that once only occupied our dreams: to fly, to peek into the furthest stretches of the firmament, to put our ideal self before the world without fear of censure. And it assures us that each of these is as real as we allow it to be, which is fine with us. Birkets writes: ”The new swallows up the memory of the old. We don’t feel the headlong momentum. From the window of a jet flying at six hundred miles per hour the blue sky looks completely still.”
The implications for humanity, for the diminishment of our sense of human presence, particularity, and vital subjectivity, are, at the very least, sobering. And that, in the end, is what this series of essays from Sven Birkets is all about: staying human, despite the temptation to fully engage the quasi-human, quasi-intellectual, quasi-spiritual, and delightfully unreflective age of information and its attendant apparatus. This is an excellent, if somewhat overlong, collection, with essays covering topics from hive behavior, serendipity, the era of envy, the importance of reading, and the necessity of unplugging, to the oddly intensified sense of separation at the deaths of distant friends in an age when the world is, reportedly, always at our fingertips.
Yet, as the redeemer admonished: Noli timere- be not afraid. A highly recommended, articulate, decidedly readable series of essays on the joys of being deliberately human in a regrettably depersonalized, increasingly technologically oriented world.
If only it were that simple. If only the type of broad-scale, unifying psychic awakening that allows us to functionally and readily sidestep our flawed humanity were possible, the means, the method – mechanical, chemical, psychological – wouldn’t much matter. And this quasi-millennial longing for singularities that could just set right everything that is wrong with the world is nearly as ubiquitous as it is irresistible: a radio signal from a distant planet encoded with the secret to free, non-polluting, renewable energy; the discovery that trans fats promote deeper spirituality; a bullet for Putin. To each his dreams, each as instantaneous as it is ephemeral.
But Birkets would argue that change, though pervasive, is of a far more deliberate character, lending both to its tentative character and to our hesitant acceptance of it. For as much as the microchip has changed the world, it has truly changed very little. His is not some irrationally stubborn luddite perspective (despite his ready, and reasonable, dismissal of the “indispensability” of digital technologies), but the compelling insistence that, despite the changes our world is undergoing, our core humanity is what it always has been, its urges and aches as they have been. We are a tactile, sensate, localized species. Were, are, will be.
And yet a new technology – much like a radiation leak – marked by intangible, the insensate, and the seemingly universal, is bringing on an anxiety born of substantive, quantifiable change. Information culture would now offer us those adventures and advantages that once only occupied our dreams: to fly, to peek into the furthest stretches of the firmament, to put our ideal self before the world without fear of censure. And it assures us that each of these is as real as we allow it to be, which is fine with us. Birkets writes: ”The new swallows up the memory of the old. We don’t feel the headlong momentum. From the window of a jet flying at six hundred miles per hour the blue sky looks completely still.”
The implications for humanity, for the diminishment of our sense of human presence, particularity, and vital subjectivity, are, at the very least, sobering. And that, in the end, is what this series of essays from Sven Birkets is all about: staying human, despite the temptation to fully engage the quasi-human, quasi-intellectual, quasi-spiritual, and delightfully unreflective age of information and its attendant apparatus. This is an excellent, if somewhat overlong, collection, with essays covering topics from hive behavior, serendipity, the era of envy, the importance of reading, and the necessity of unplugging, to the oddly intensified sense of separation at the deaths of distant friends in an age when the world is, reportedly, always at our fingertips.
Yet, as the redeemer admonished: Noli timere- be not afraid. A highly recommended, articulate, decidedly readable series of essays on the joys of being deliberately human in a regrettably depersonalized, increasingly technologically oriented world.
December 29, 2015
Sven Birkerts is a good, clear thinker, which comes through these seventeen well-written expository essays. Birkerts says we are trapped inside an immense information system. But he finds comfort by remaining aware of the culture's digital immersion and by avoiding the more pernicious aspects, such as preferences determined by algorithms.
A two hundred fifty page book usually takes a few days. But the thought-provoking essays here led to many unfocused gazes into space, contemplating the reframing and thinking-through of the issues raised by Birkerts. He is very quotable, which resulted in eighteen index cards of notes and quotes.
This five-star book of thoughtful think pieces lost a star for lack of context, foreword or introduction. These essays previously published in literary journals. But lacking the dates of original publication, we cannot know the chronology or time span of Birkerts evolving thoughts.
Changing the Subject published with two subtitles — the one that Goodreads shows here and the edition I read: Art and Attention in the Internet Age, which is the one that attracted me to the book.
Changing the Subject pairs well with Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. It also pairs well with Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.
The New York Times Book Review paired Changing the Subject and Reclaiming Conversation on the cover of its Oct 4th edition, where I learned about them.
The pleasure of reading takes many forms. One pleasure involves the networking connections to other books and films, including those that go in expected directions. Birkerts mentions many sources that color his thinking. Two of those sources appealed to me for a closer, first-hand look:
— On Reading, for example, by André Kertész, which celebrates the act of reading.
— Also, a Wim Wenders film, "Wings of Desire." Birkerts found an ethereal timelessness in scenes that showed a large library where browsers strolled the stacks and patiently fingered books. Angels live in the library. One of them falls in love with a circus performer, becoming a fallen angel from his wings of desire. This turned out to be a fine film, part of The Criterion Collection of special films. https://www.criterion.com/films/200-w...
A two hundred fifty page book usually takes a few days. But the thought-provoking essays here led to many unfocused gazes into space, contemplating the reframing and thinking-through of the issues raised by Birkerts. He is very quotable, which resulted in eighteen index cards of notes and quotes.
This five-star book of thoughtful think pieces lost a star for lack of context, foreword or introduction. These essays previously published in literary journals. But lacking the dates of original publication, we cannot know the chronology or time span of Birkerts evolving thoughts.
Changing the Subject published with two subtitles — the one that Goodreads shows here and the edition I read: Art and Attention in the Internet Age, which is the one that attracted me to the book.
Changing the Subject pairs well with Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. It also pairs well with Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.
The New York Times Book Review paired Changing the Subject and Reclaiming Conversation on the cover of its Oct 4th edition, where I learned about them.
The pleasure of reading takes many forms. One pleasure involves the networking connections to other books and films, including those that go in expected directions. Birkerts mentions many sources that color his thinking. Two of those sources appealed to me for a closer, first-hand look:
— On Reading, for example, by André Kertész, which celebrates the act of reading.
— Also, a Wim Wenders film, "Wings of Desire." Birkerts found an ethereal timelessness in scenes that showed a large library where browsers strolled the stacks and patiently fingered books. Angels live in the library. One of them falls in love with a circus performer, becoming a fallen angel from his wings of desire. This turned out to be a fine film, part of The Criterion Collection of special films. https://www.criterion.com/films/200-w...
February 20, 2017
I almost bailed on this book after the first few essays, which didn't grab me. So glad I pushed on. I loved all the essays with "reading" in the title and three others: "It Wants to Find You" (maybe my favorite; I want to copy and share it with a few family members), "The Salieri Syndrome: Envy and Achievement" (on artistic envy), and "Idleness" (I want to contact the author to ask if he has considered the connection with Sabbath time). I felt my reading (*attending*) self reawakened and stirred by this book, and I look forward to reading more by its author.
November 9, 2021
There are seventeen essays in this collection (which apparently has another subtitle, “The Mediated Self”) most of which, as the title suggests, revolve around the impact that the internet has upon our consciousness. Birkerts is not a Luddite and admits that he uses the internet as much as anyone, but that is no reason not to look at it critically. One of the pleasures of reading Birkerts is that he circles around his subject, examining it from different angles.
He points out, for example, that modern life is constantly stimulating us with all kinds of electronic devices. We search, fragment, skim, accelerate, and generally find it harder to sustain a level of concentration. Why does this matter? Birkerts thinks that one point of living is to immerse oneself in experience. Technology alters that experience and turns it into something shallower. Take the GPS. What does it do but short-circuit the old trial-and-error approaches that used to map our progress through the world, and we end up by handing over control to a technological device. Is that a bad thing? It depends, but it’s something we should be aware of.
It ‘s difficult to summarize a collection of essays, published in different times and places, but one topic that is frequently the center of Birkerts’ attention is reading. Reading of literature is an act of contemplation. Birkerts writes, “If reading sometimes feels like the most intense possible self-communion, it’s because this contemplative solitude is the purest version of self.”
What the internet does best is to gather facts about specified topics; in fact this is what all of our technologies do, and what is downplayed is reflection and “imaginative projection, contemplation – thinking for its own sake.” Activities such as imaginative fiction and poetry are valued less because they do not give easily stated meanings, something the internet search engine does best. Again, why does his matter? Birkerts thinks the internet weakens our ability to focus.
Birkerts writes that access to factual memory is not the only way we grasp information, impressions, and even understanding. He uses a food analogy; “The reader who reads without directed concentration, who skims, or even just steps hurriedly across the surface, is missing much of the real point of the work; he is gobbling his foie gras.”
Two writers near the end of these essays capture what is important. One is the 19th century Ralph Waldo Emerson who insisted on openness to experience, a state that Birkerts finds lacking today, “The complexity of the technologized works has distracted us completely. . .” The other is the Irish writer, Seamus Heaney, who “fused in his work a power of unmediated attentiveness, of focus, and an ear attuned to the highly nuanced layerings of language. . . for him imagination was primary.”
November 18, 2018
Really really close to 5 stars! I would probably give this book around 4.7, 4.8 stars!
I have found one of my new favorite non-fiction books! This book will be in my mind for the longest time. I choose to read this book for an assignment for my Public Speaking class and am glad that I picked it up, reading through it long after the assignment was over. This is not a book that I would have picked up if not for my assignment, but one that will stand out in my reading years later. Sven Birkerts has a writing style that is both thoughtful-provoking and beautiful. Every single sentence that I read made me think and want to read more. I became almost obsessed with reading this book and really looked forward to each time I was able to pick it up and read it uninterrupted. It resonated with me and how I use the internet, I saw and realized so many things by reading this book. I learned a lot of things that connected to who I am as a person. It is a book about things that I am interested in. A voice that spoke on the topic of attention with detail and care, with thought and importance. Sven Birkerts is very intelligence and I could tell that he put a lot of himself and the world in this book. Changing the Subject hurts in its honesty, touches a person right in their mind and makes them look at themselves and the internet in a brand new light. Read this book, if it sounds like something you are into. It will exceed ever expectation that you could ever have.
I wish that I could experience this book again, but I know with each read that I will learn something new.
I have found one of my new favorite non-fiction books! This book will be in my mind for the longest time. I choose to read this book for an assignment for my Public Speaking class and am glad that I picked it up, reading through it long after the assignment was over. This is not a book that I would have picked up if not for my assignment, but one that will stand out in my reading years later. Sven Birkerts has a writing style that is both thoughtful-provoking and beautiful. Every single sentence that I read made me think and want to read more. I became almost obsessed with reading this book and really looked forward to each time I was able to pick it up and read it uninterrupted. It resonated with me and how I use the internet, I saw and realized so many things by reading this book. I learned a lot of things that connected to who I am as a person. It is a book about things that I am interested in. A voice that spoke on the topic of attention with detail and care, with thought and importance. Sven Birkerts is very intelligence and I could tell that he put a lot of himself and the world in this book. Changing the Subject hurts in its honesty, touches a person right in their mind and makes them look at themselves and the internet in a brand new light. Read this book, if it sounds like something you are into. It will exceed ever expectation that you could ever have.
I wish that I could experience this book again, but I know with each read that I will learn something new.
September 20, 2016
Earnest, well-meaning. Also plodding and repetitive and afraid to assert anything. The opening essay (which says, basically, “The world is now digital; probably that affects the way we read and write”) appears to be setting up general terms that the later essays will investigate, but the remaining essays rarely move beyond generalities. The book feels like what it is: a collecting of essays previously published in journals and magazines, essays which don’t add up to a book but instead force the reader to watch worried circles being walked over and over on the same patch of dirt.
It’s Sunday-magazine writing and can be read with that kind of half-attention. Birkerts rarely challenges himself or his readers. Instead of actually performing the difficult thought required by questions about reading and writing in the digital age, thinking his way to some insight or answer, Birkerts’s default mode is to simply declare that such thinking needs to be done. (His favorite rhetorical move is to say “How could it not?” in answer to questions like, “Has reading on screens redefined our relationship to text?” That’s not exactly illuminating.)
The fuzzy thought produces fuzzy sentences. The prose is approximate and inexact, polluted by unconscious metaphor. There’s an annoying amount of fuss and filler, talkiness (which is supposed to feel personal), hedging (which is supposed to seem humble), and generalizing (which is supposed to feel hieratic or statesmanlike). Birkerts has proven elsewhere that he can do better than this.
It’s Sunday-magazine writing and can be read with that kind of half-attention. Birkerts rarely challenges himself or his readers. Instead of actually performing the difficult thought required by questions about reading and writing in the digital age, thinking his way to some insight or answer, Birkerts’s default mode is to simply declare that such thinking needs to be done. (His favorite rhetorical move is to say “How could it not?” in answer to questions like, “Has reading on screens redefined our relationship to text?” That’s not exactly illuminating.)
The fuzzy thought produces fuzzy sentences. The prose is approximate and inexact, polluted by unconscious metaphor. There’s an annoying amount of fuss and filler, talkiness (which is supposed to feel personal), hedging (which is supposed to seem humble), and generalizing (which is supposed to feel hieratic or statesmanlike). Birkerts has proven elsewhere that he can do better than this.
June 25, 2016
These essays, collected from a variety of sources, didn't necessarily have a strong affinity with each other. The discussions on technology and what it's doing to human attention were the strongest.
Sample quote: "Sometimes it seems that nothing marks our cultural viability, or lack thereof, more visibly than the vintage of our phone and computer. To carry an underperforming device---one that cannot (heavens!) access the Internet or send photo files, or who know what else---is to declare your essential unfitness for the rigors of the twenty-first century."
Sample quote: "Sometimes it seems that nothing marks our cultural viability, or lack thereof, more visibly than the vintage of our phone and computer. To carry an underperforming device---one that cannot (heavens!) access the Internet or send photo files, or who know what else---is to declare your essential unfitness for the rigors of the twenty-first century."
August 22, 2016
This is a collection of essays first published elsewhere (thus each essay has a 'stand-alone' quality about it) but are all loosely related to the topic of how technology has changed our behavior in so many ways. At first I was scared that his writing was going to be over-intellectual and over my head but instead I found it engaging and thought-provoking, and I wonder how anyone learns to think and write like that anymore...the book is way better than I am at describing it.
July 15, 2015
An eloquent look at how the digital age affects reading habits and ultimately, kills the restorative/inspiring nature of material culture (novels, letters, bookshelves, record store shopping).
Rather than simply demonize technology, Birkerts exalts the culture/human nature that is overshadowed by the "unprecedented explosion of data."
Rather than simply demonize technology, Birkerts exalts the culture/human nature that is overshadowed by the "unprecedented explosion of data."
September 27, 2018
I have been reading Sven Birkerts for almost 25 years, and re-read the Gutenberg Elegies every few years just to reflect and figure out "how did we get here?" He challenges the intellect, but also our cultural beliefs, and even (whether he intends to or not) our spiritual selves. I would love to hang out with him for a weekend and pick his brain.
July 14, 2021
No me mató la verdad! A mitad del libro perdí el interés. No se si fue por la forma de escribir o de abordar los temas.
February 4, 2016
Interesting & thought provoking. Sven is, despite repeated claims to the contrary, a Luddite.
June 28, 2018
I was surprised to find so much academic jargon in a bookstore purchase. I was initially intrigued by the subtitle, which on my copy is "art and attention in the internet age. " I think the "self-mediated" subtitle is a more accurate description.
Not only did I find his use of 'intellectual' language unnecessary (and this coming from a university researcher), but I was frustrated by the repeated use of topics and phrases in individual essays. I understand wanting a theme and some continuation to your work, but why do I feel I read 3 essays saying the exact same thing? (Probably due to the fact that these essays were originally published as stand alone in different periodicals).
I can, however, appreciate his point of view and the desire to provoke thought and conversation and even agree with much of what he said.
Not only did I find his use of 'intellectual' language unnecessary (and this coming from a university researcher), but I was frustrated by the repeated use of topics and phrases in individual essays. I understand wanting a theme and some continuation to your work, but why do I feel I read 3 essays saying the exact same thing? (Probably due to the fact that these essays were originally published as stand alone in different periodicals).
I can, however, appreciate his point of view and the desire to provoke thought and conversation and even agree with much of what he said.
May 9, 2021
Sven's essays on attention on the digital age hit home many times. As a digital worker I spent all my working days in front of a computer, constantly pressed to multi-task, to context-switch on a daily basis. Oblivious of the blurred lines separating work and _life_.
Every essay is a world on each one and deserves their own consideration. But if you're even slightly worried about the pervasive invasion of technology into your life -into everyone's life- and the fragmentation of one's self attention then _attend_ Sven's words.
Every essay is a world on each one and deserves their own consideration. But if you're even slightly worried about the pervasive invasion of technology into your life -into everyone's life- and the fragmentation of one's self attention then _attend_ Sven's words.
August 22, 2018
I wanted The Gutenberg Elegies part 2, but this collection of essays is not that for me. I simply could not connect with many of the topics. I am sure much of the fault lies with me - just as I do not tolerate collections of short stories well, I find that it is a very rare collection of essays that captures me. Perhaps it was worth the time for two lengthy passages that I have included in my stash of writing I want to refer to.
May 5, 2019
The subtitle of this book is “art and attention in the internet age”. But, it seems to be a selection of ruminations on how technology is a threat to the imagination. This may very well be true, but I see little evidence in this book beyond personal interpretation and literary references to support it. And, given all the references throughout, one would hope for, at the least, a bibliography, but no.
September 11, 2017
This was not an easy read. I found it to be the longest short book ever. Sven does make some excellent points though, and is able to express in words things that are almost impossible to express in words.
This is one of my favorite sentences, and for me, sums up the book: "The world may be our oyster, but it is a farm-raised creature, not an essence drawn up from the seabed."
This is one of my favorite sentences, and for me, sums up the book: "The world may be our oyster, but it is a farm-raised creature, not an essence drawn up from the seabed."
June 7, 2021
This is a collection of previously published essays all about technological encroachment. Some of them were great but a lot of them could be summed up as "Old man yells at cloud computing". I'd pass on reading it.
September 30, 2017
Odaklanmamıza engel olan internete küçük küçük giydirdim kitabı.
February 8, 2021
Sven makes me want to read more.
June 5, 2022
Very challenging and thought provoking. I would definitely read it again.
May 18, 2025
I always enjoy essays reminding me to put the screens down & spend time reading and absorbing
March 18, 2017
Esejas lielākoties ir ļoti labas, taču vairums ir par vienu un to pašu tēmu ar līdzīgu pamatdomu, kas liek tās knābāt, nevis aprīt dažos piesēdienos.
(tulkošu izlasi no šīs & vēl vienas grāmatas, tas būs labākais variants)
(tulkošu izlasi no šīs & vēl vienas grāmatas, tas būs labākais variants)
February 18, 2017
I read this book thanks to the app Blinkist.
The key message in this book:
Our involvement with apps and the internet is stronger than ever. We check our email the moment we wake up and stay glued to our screens until we fall asleep. And our constant urge to be digitally connected is diminishing our experiences and deteriorating our ability to focus.
The key message in this book:
Our involvement with apps and the internet is stronger than ever. We check our email the moment we wake up and stay glued to our screens until we fall asleep. And our constant urge to be digitally connected is diminishing our experiences and deteriorating our ability to focus.
Want to read
March 15, 2016This couples well with Crawford's TWBYH. While the latter refrains from pointing the finger at technology itself, preferring to focus on the politics and philosophy of attention, Birkerts has no problem telling us to put away the devices and sit with a book, which he considers an attention trainer. But he doesn't stop there; he provides extensive justifications for the value of reading today. In the wake of our vast technological advancements, Birkerts asks if we have rashly discarded essential forms of humanity, and if reading can restore them to us. Crawford's book is neat, clear, and cohesive, but because Birkerts' book is a collection of articles, often in response to other articles, some of the essays are overlapping and repetitive. Nonetheless, most are personal, poetic, and "beautiful" (a word Birkerts fears has faded from our collective consciousness).
July 20, 2016
The book opens a different perspective on era which we live in. Sven Birkets points out that we are experiencing an immersive transformation of our life routines nowadays and an unnoticeable shift of personal identity toward collective mindset because of massive electronic data and gadget usage.
Mostly I disagree with author's ideas, because tech change and its influences on our lives are naturally occurring, unstoppable processes of human development. Our concern is be sure to control and navigate these processes for the benefit instead of complaining about the losses and looking back into the past. The most successful technology gets out of the way and helps us live our lives. However, the author emphasizes philosophical concerns of losing expertise, authorship and individual creativity. As well as loosing of physical presence of many things. It makes sense. To be aware of it.
Mostly I disagree with author's ideas, because tech change and its influences on our lives are naturally occurring, unstoppable processes of human development. Our concern is be sure to control and navigate these processes for the benefit instead of complaining about the losses and looking back into the past. The most successful technology gets out of the way and helps us live our lives. However, the author emphasizes philosophical concerns of losing expertise, authorship and individual creativity. As well as loosing of physical presence of many things. It makes sense. To be aware of it.
December 21, 2015
Well, I really had no choice but to read this book. I don't own a cell phone, this site is the closest I come to interacting with social media (notice the grand total of two people I have on my friends list), and I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Birkerts that we are all way to saturated with all of this for our own good. It's inescapable, but that's no excuse to drown in it.
I recommend you put down the phone you are using to read this and get a copy of this book (or perhaps some Thoreau). Don't order it online, instead go support your local bookstore (if you are lucky enough to have an indie, non-chain store, even better). Perhaps have an exchange of ideas with people in real time for a change and remember that we all used to live this way once.
I recommend you put down the phone you are using to read this and get a copy of this book (or perhaps some Thoreau). Don't order it online, instead go support your local bookstore (if you are lucky enough to have an indie, non-chain store, even better). Perhaps have an exchange of ideas with people in real time for a change and remember that we all used to live this way once.
March 24, 2017
Raised important issues about the negative effects of technology and electronic connection, and what we lose in term of f2f dialogue and sustained attention. I just wish the author had addressed those of us who use computers and the Internet constructively - taking courses, leading book discussions, doing research for our writing etc. - and who aren't wasting hours collecting "friends" on Facebook. Even if we're constructive and productive, facets of our real life is suffering and our brains are changing. I make sure I read with sustained attention - at least 50 pages of a book each day, in one sitting, and turn off the phone most of the time. I'd also like to see more guidance for mastering our 21th century tools rather than being mastered by them.
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December 7, 2015I am not typically a big fan of collecting previously-published essays and calling that a book. In some cases, the essays being collected are so good, I don't mind, and this might turn out to be one of those cases. But I am going to have to read the book again before I decide. Started out really liking the book and impressed with the quality of the essays, but by the end I was kind of tired and annoyed by the sense that the contents were not related enough to belong in the same book. Now that I am done, I will read some other stuff and come back around for another reading when I am refreshed.
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