It don hav 2B so!

Response to excerpts from Sven Birkets’ The Gutenberg Elegies (1994)

I think it is funny that Birkets thinks we will need fifty years to transition into the new age of technology. It has been 19 years since he wrote his text, and we can already see the effects of modern communicative technology on our youth. As he stated, “the pace if rapid,” and technology has advanced at sky-rocket speed.
However, reading his article explained why I have adapted so well to the computer age (acknowledgment made that I was not raised in the pc generation). I feel that I think laterally (sometimes I think I am ADD). I am okay with following the “rabbit trails” (as I call them). I am okay with reading a forth of an article, following a hyperlink to its end, and then returning to that article, and then following another rabbit trail. I think this kind of information mapping can be helpful in making sense of language because I can learn what as aspects of a subject before I finish the article. In fact, I have added hyperlinks to my blog so that my readers can have an overview of S. Burroughs in order to understand my blog. AND I fully expect that they will leave my blog to investigate him, then I expect (or hope) they will return to my blog to finish reading my post. In a way, it is dialogism (polyphony and heterglossia) because there are competing individual voices all explaining the same issue. But, I also believe it is incumbent on me to make my argument interesting enough to hook them back after they have followed a hyperlink. I also love the tag-lines, the bullet points, the charts, the pictures, the hyperlinks, etc.

BUT I do believe Birkets has an argument about language erosion: “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.” We live in a sitcom world where all our problems must be solved in one 30-minute episode. Not only have we shortened our attention span, but we’ve shortened our literature (into 2 hour movies for 600 page novels) and our language: Fab or fabulous, BFF (best friend forever), pc (politically correct). Yet this phenomenon is not new to English speakers. Take for instance, “don’t” (do not), ain’t (am not), and FYI (for your information). IM (instant message) speak seems to me to be the culmination of an every changing and reinventing societal language. Nevertheless, his argument about literature does make me sad, but I’m not sure it has to be that way. An older woman (about 60 years of age) once approached my daughter, who was reading Pride and Prejudice at that moment, and told her that she (the lady) should could not read that book because of archaic language. My daughter, at age 14, read the book with no trouble. By Birkets’ argument, these roles should have been reversed. It is through television that I was introduced to Jane Austen and fell in love with her works. I found the book and read it with a dictionary nearby--honest. And more to the point, my son, after watching The Lord of the Rings, read all Tolkien’s books, including the ever-difficult Silmarillion (which, I am given to understand, few teens can make it through). Therefore, I think Birkets’ dire predictions do not have to come to fruition. We can still embrace the technological revolution, yet bend it towards our own advantages and the advantages of our younger generation.