The Gutenberg Elegies: Is The Message Really The Medium?

Alyssa James
Jane Frankenfeld
English 101, 2910, A
15 October 2012
Is the Message Really the Medium? In the new millennium, almost everything is digital. Now days, most people have access to the Internet and the billions of bits of information it contains. Books are now electronic and can be read on tablets and smart phones. This raises a few questions: Does this serge in electronics mean that we are no longer thinking critically of the information and merely walking the surface? Or does way we receive this information have and no effect on how a person processes information? This has been a debate for years, and has been weighed in on by countless people. Two of those people are Sven Birkerts and Wen Stephenson. Birkerts believes that
In Birkerts’ essay, “The Owl Has Flown” he begins with talking about the shift from “mechanical to circuit driven” reading in order to set up his main argument. Birkerts says that “how we receive information bears vitally on the way we experience and interpret reality” (33). Birkerts is saying that how people acquire information greatly impacts the way they observe, participate in and make sense of the world around them. The fact that people have changed the way they are getting information and are now using electronics, often more than books, the way they absorb information has changed as well. This leads into Birkerts speaking about “vertical vs. horizontal” thinking. While explaining reading in modern times, Birkerts says, “the inscription is light but it covers vast territories: quantity is elevated over quality” (34). Birkerts seems to think that with so much information available at the click of a button, people are inclined to think deeply about that information, and instead just on to something new. Stephenson would disagree. In his essay “The Message is the Medium”, Stephenson makes a case against Birkerts argument, calling it a “ubiquitous cliché”. To Stephenson, the way that we are getting information does not indicate how well we process it and how deeply we think about
To some, the medium in which the information is being presented does have an effect on how well they process said information or how deeply they think about it. There are people that experience information presented in physical form differently than they do when it is presented to them in a digital form. Some need to hold the book in their hands, turn the pages back and forth and write notes in the margins. Although you can go back in the text and make notes on the sides of the pages on electronic devices, it is just not the same. For others, working with digital information is easier. They may be able navigate the text better on an electronic device than with a book or a group of papers. Some may even be able to find comfort and support in online communities (like Stephenson