Changing the Subject
Art and Attention in the Internet Age
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this anxious and rapturous book of essays, all previously published in literary magazines, Birkerts (The Gutenberg Elegies) posits the decline of "literary reading" and argues that the importance of the individual the subjective "I" so central to Enlightenment culture diminishes along with it. For Birkerts, the value in reading imaginative writing (fiction, poetry, even certain essays) doesn't lie in the accumulation of plots or perspectives, but the exercise of empathetic attention. Increasingly sophisticated technologies, he fears, are irreversibly rewiring our brains in such a way that dissolves contemplation in the acid anxiety of the Internet's endless possibility the daily news cycle, social media, instant entertainment, and the knowledge that with your smartphone you can reach and be reached at any time. The present (not to mention the future) is more like Jorge Luis Borges's vertiginous "library of Babel" than the rosy prognostications of the "digerati," as Birkerts calls tech entrepreneurs, journalists, digital librarians, and (groan) young people. Birkerts has a knack for vividly conveying the phenomenology of reading fiction, and, drawing on the work of the Romantics, is convincing on the topic of its moral value. At the same time, he might do well to show he knows that reading novels was not so long ago condescended to as an unserious, even morally hazardous, activity.
