Into the Electronic Revolution

Do me a favor; put away your cell phone, turn off the music and pay attention. If you are reading this essay to learn something, you must actively engage with it; otherwise you may as well go back to checking your Facebook news feed. Some academics observe the popularity of sites like Facebook and Twitter and dismiss any possibility of using the Internet as a tool for education. One of these pundits, a former Harvard professor named Sven Birkerts, single-handedly catalyzed the polemic with his writings, and it remains to be seen whether or not he was right.

One moment in his essay “Into the Electronic Millennium” reflects on his encounter years ago with a professor who, because he managed a rare and used book shop, wanted to sell him his entire book collection. When asked to explain his divestiture, the man replied that he saw that computers were the future, and that his books represented a lot of pain for him. For Birkerts, a bibliophile by nature, this memory was rather unsettling.

It is a kind of marker in my mental life, for that afternoon I got my first serious inkling that all was not well in the world of print and letters. All sorts of corroborations followed. Our professor was by no means an isolated case. Over a period of several years we met with quite a few others like him. New men and new women who had glimpsed the future and had decided to get while the getting was good. The selling off of books was sometimes done for financial reasons, but the other thing was usually there as well: the need to burn bridges. It was as if heading to the future also required the destruction of tokens from the past. (470)

The author fears that the selling off of books destroys pieces of the past. To him, people who sold their libraries and bought computers were completely abandoning the world of print. Considering the massive bookshelves in my home that have sat untouched for some time, though I come from a family of readers, I am inclined to agree. Online reading is seductively convenient compared to the process of finding and buying books.     

This seduction raises an important question: given the convenience and ubiquity of the Internet, how harmful could it be? As a much younger form of communication than print, we will

only know whether or not it caused a break with the past in posterity. Birkerts makes a number of predictions in his essay based on inherent problems with digital media that are not found in print.

Print, which is bound to logic by the imperatives of syntax, requires the active engagement of the reader. Materials are layered; they lend themselves to rereading and to sustained inquiry. The pace of reading is variable, with progress determined by attentiveness and comprehension. The electronic order is in most ways the opposite because information travels along a network. It can be passive, as with television watching, or interactive, as with computers. With visual media, impression and image take precedence over logic and concept. As such, the viewer absorbs a steady wash of packaged messages. (472)

The nature of Print as a thought-intensive medium makes it subject to strict rules of logic and syntax, and any published work must be supported by historical context. The Internet is not subject to this, which encourages more and more people to use anecdotes such as ‘I once read somewhere that...’ in their discourse. Moreover, content on the Internet requires neither sustained reading nor processing, and is often published with no quality control. Much of this content is thus rendered unusable for serious purposes.

Even so, print carries its own set of drawbacks; research is a painstaking process that becomes even more arduous by sifting through books. Moreover, the depth of a book depends almost entirely on the reader’s background. Unless he has previous knowledge of Salic Law or the foundations of European Monarchy, he would little benefit from reading the unabridged edition of Don Quixote. Perhaps most distressing is that written language is ambiguous, and like visual media can become propaganda in the wrong hands. I find that the two mediums have complementary roles; Google and Wikipedia are efficient tools for gathering data, while books donate structure and points of debate to one’s research. Web hyperlinks enable a deeper understanding of a subject, and books keep one’s thought processes coherent. The comments sections on websites provide exposure to multiple points of view, but analytical papers ensure that an investigation stays focused. The problem, as seen in the quote above, is persuading people that the two can coexist.

How can they coexist when students use the Internet for everything but school? Observing this, Birkerts argues that the Internet has worsened the decline of America’s education systems, and warns us of the “possibility that the young truly “know no other way,” that they are not made of the same stuff that their elders are.” (473) He fears that it has destroyed the work ethic of today’s youth, and that technology may be the only “way” they know how to learn. The other “ways” are the classroom paradigms of the lecture, the seminar, and the Western Canon. I agree with the letter of this warning; physical textbooks hold little interest with students who grew up with technology, especially for boys, since they are both naturally hyperactive and mainly visual learners. But if the lingua franca of today’s youth is technology, then why not teach them with it? I remember my 11th-grade Anatomy classes as being among the most informative and enjoyable parts of high school, because our teacher used animations to illustrate the lessons. This makes me believe that other classes would meet success with illumination.

One of the reasons that public school students struggle is because almost none of their classes emphasize visual learning. Worse, much of the work they do is so repetitive that it effectively discourages learning. The effects of both problems are so pervasive that they can even be seen in the “best” students; while researching for a public speaking class last year, I found a graduation speech by Erica Goldson, the valedictorian of Coxsackie-Athens high school, that described how the work that went into her success ultimately stunted her education.

While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it. So, I wonder, why did I even want this position? Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it? When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. (4)

Erica’s exceptional grades came at the cost of her ability to pursue extracurricular activities. By going through school  ‘by the book’, she was unable to explore possible future areas of study. She is now travelling around America, hoping to construct an identity for herself. Though I often imagine it would be fun to be a perfect student, Ms. Goldson’s story underscores the need for one to be interested in their work in order to learn from it.  

Because few of today’s students are interested in the classics, some have suggested that it is time to revise the Western Canon. Such a change would cause more harm than good, because it would hinder students from learning the foundations of western civilization. Fellow classicist and NYU student Andrew Montalenti takes a different approach to the problem, arguing that while people can and should still learn from the classics, they must be taught in a different manner.

I thus emphasize what should already be evident: the Canon does not make the artwork within it great; it is the artwork that makes the Canon great. By remembering this, our interpretation of these works can be richer and much more complicated than a mere deductive confirmation of expert opinion. (2)

Students must be allowed to draw their own conclusions from reading these works. This would give them the ability to be as interested in the Canon as they are in reality shows. A number of recent movies (“Romeo and Juliet”, “300” and “Gladiator”), shows on HBO (“John Adams” and “The Tudors”) and video-games (the “Assassin’s Creed” series) accomplish this by giving audiences a pleasurable, accidental introduction to the Canon. Teachers could use these to convey lessons in the lingua franca while respecting the intellectual sovereignty of their students.
    Assuming visual media to be of no use for teaching, Birkerts predicted three major events that may come true should the status quo be kept. With no impetus for people to develop their communication skills, the majority of people will increasingly use “plainspeak”; a dumbed-down language similar to “newspeak” from George Orwell’s 1984 (474). If Internet content remains shallow, there will be a collective forgetting of historical perspectives (475). Worse, without exposure to diverse perspectives, a social collectivization is highly probable; people will be polarized along national, ethnic and religious lines, and the concept of individuality will cease to exist (475). If these predictions came true, it would spell the end of free will for everyone but the political and economic elite. For this reason, before attempting to counteract them, we must first make sure that they haven’t already happened.

If Birkerts’ assertions were correct, I would have no business using computers to do schoolwork. If, however, I found an investigation that dispelled his worries, my only concern would be to use technology responsibly. I found such an investigation by the BBC regarding “the social consequences of the Internet” (16). As the author Michael Lewis made headway into the project, he found that the network actually encouraged the exercise of free will.

What I was after was more like the Internet consequences of society. People take on the new tools they are ready for, and only make use of what they need, how they need it. If they were using the Internet to experiment with their identities, it was probably because they found their old identities were inadequate. If the Internet was giving the world a shove in a certain direction, it was probably because the world already felt inclined to move in that direction. When I realized this I stopped worrying over the social consequences of the Internet and began simply to watch what was actually happening on the Internet. Inadvertently, it was telling us what we wanted to become. (16)

People embraced the technology, not out of coercion or hypnosis, but because they wanted to. This allowed for experimentation with their identities, as well as the creation of entirely new ones; many youths used it to explore interests in music, finance and law, which destabilized institutional monopolies of these industries. This, I believe, was the cause of peoples’ worries; thousands of jobs were at risk for every company to go bankrupt.

This concern over job security also helps explain Birkerts’ fears; a growing disinterest in literature threatens his ability to teach, and it is understandable that he would believe the Internet is to blame. It is also possible to address these fears while meeting the needs of students like Erica Goldson, Andrew Montalenti, and myself. Our desire to learn is still present, but we also want to develop perspectives that are not derived solely from our teachers. We should be able to share our knowledge with our peers and remove the intellectual inequalities that come from a one-way, teacher-to-student learning paradigm. This could be rendered by a website that allowed students to discuss and collaborate on their assignments, thus alleviating the burden on teachers to make sure no one is left behind. By distributing our knowledge amongst ourselves, more class time could be spent on learning new things rather than reviewing old lessons, enabling us to more fully realize our academic potential. I intend to create such a website, and hopefully find a solution that would please even the likes of Sven Birkerts. Rather than trying to prove him wrong, I want to reassure him, and myself, that our past will not be forgotten in the electronic revolution. 

Works Cited:


Birkerts, Sven. “Into the Electronic Millennium.” Occasions for Writing. Ed. Robert DiYanni and Pat C. Hoy II. Boston: Thomas Wadsworth, 2007. 469-76.



Montalenti, Andrew. “Questioning the Canon.” Mercer Street. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II. New York: NYU College of Arts and Science. 2003. 1-7.


Goldson, Erica. (2010, June). Here I stand. Valedictorian speech presented at Coxsackie-Athens High School. Coxsackie-Athens, New York.


Lewis, Michael. “Next. The future just happened.” New York: W. W. Norton and Company. 2001. 16-216.