The ideas of the first two chapters of The Gutenberg Elegies (Sven Birkets) are neither original nor true. He, like so many of his bitter peers, believe that this new generation, the “age of technology”, is uninterested, unimaginative, and anti-intellectual. He, in a highly-bitter sentiment that we’ve all heard before, thinks that our electronics are distracting from or even replacing imagination and learning. While there may be some truth to this statement (although much less severe than he makes it out to be), the benefits of technology in terms of promoting reading and learning completely overshadow their distractions. Birkets is blinded conceit, by his stubbornness towards change, and by his “my generation is superior to yours” complex.
Birkets argues that when he was a child, he didn’t have such distractions as we do today, and he therefore turned to books and stories for his entertainment. The implication here is that somehow reading something on physical pages of paper is somehow a much different, superior way of reading something than reading it on a computer, a kindle, etc. He also seems to just be ignoring the fact that the TV can be used as a fantastic medium for great works of film, such as Casablanca, Laurence of Arabia, Gone With the Wind, etc. He seems to just toss out everything on the TV as mindless distractions, which is simply not fair.
Birkets thinks that younger people reading fewer books means less reading, and yet from around when he was a young man, the 1970s, to present day, the worldwide literacy rate has increased 22%. There is no doubt that, overall, people are actually reading more today than they ever have, just not necessarily ONLY in the form of print-paper books. One could argue that this is a mere coincidental correlation with the increase in technology, as apposed to being directly related. To that I would say that today’s technology absolutely promotes reading. Give someone access to the internet and suddenly they have access to hundreds of libraries worth of literature, to millions and millions of differing ideas and opinions, to guides and help in hundreds of languages. The idea that computers are only making us stupider is a boring, incorrect and outdated opinion.
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