Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age

by Sven Birkerts

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555977214
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	10/06/2015
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Sven Birkerts is the author of The Other Walk, Reading Life: Books for the Ages, Readings, The Gutenberg Elegies, and a memoir, My Sky Blue Trades. The director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he also edits the journal AGNI based at Boston University. Birkerts lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Editorial Reviews

08/10/2015
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. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

One of America's most distinguished, eloquent servants of the poetry and fiction that matter.” —Susan Sontag on Sven Birkerts

“Birkerts on reading fiction is like M.F.K. Fisher on eating or Norman Maclean on fly casting. He makes you want to go do it.” —Jonathan Franzen, The New Yorker on Sven Birkerts

From the Publisher

09/01/2015
For Birkerts (The Gutenberg Elegies), agency once meant something as simple as brushing dust from the needle of a record player and setting it to play once more. It meant mapping one's own road, sans GPS, or setting aside distractions to sink into the imaginary world found in a book. Like Susan Greenfield (Mind Change) and other technology skeptics, Birkerts argues in this collection of essays that humanity is evolving a less than desirable pattern of thought and behavior as we uncritically accept new technologies. Birkerts points to the plasticity of the human brain and suggests that we must, necessarily, be changed for the worse by our twitchy texting, googling, and e-reading. He makes his argument most compellingly as he describes his experience as a reader—how the physical text allows him to pursue a sustained thought, a unique reflection that leads to his own creative act. Birkerts warns that society will lose a great deal if it no longer cultivates focus, introspection, and individuality by encouraging its members to step off the grid and imagine a little for themselves. VERDICT Recommended for readers seeking a literary take on the philosophy and psychology of technological change.—Talea Anderson, College Place, WA

Library Journal

2015-06-15
A literary critic questions the effect of digital technology on minds, literature, and creativity. Although he uses computers, email, and GPS, Birkerts (The Other Walk: Essays, 2011, etc.), director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and editor of the literary journal AGNI at Boston University, wonders how those technologies have changed both the content they convey and users' connections to "the unmediated world…are these fabulous gains of access and ease really given without a counterbalancing sacrifice?" That choice of the word "sacrifice" reflects the author's suspicion, reiterated in many of these previously published essays, that "new technologies and behaviors have a way of encroaching almost visibly" to change the way we think—usually for the worst. When we use a search engine, he asserts, "we give over any real sense of control over our contexts…making ourselves that much more fit to be nodes in a larger system, that much less our independent selves." When we use GPS, we risk "floating weightlessly from here to there without a strong notion of origins or destination." Birkerts points to studies in neuroscience that find "short-term adaptations and neural reconfigurings" as a result of "digital expansion." Long-term effects, he acknowledges, are still unknown. The author worries, especially about the possibility that imagination may become compromised "every time another digital prosthesis appears and puts another thin layer of sheathing between ourselves and the essential givens of our existence." He also worries that these prostheses give us a skewed sense of agency and power; in his opinion, agency is being diminished: "If being a Luddite has come to mean refusing to rubber-stamp without questioning everything that passes for progress, then where do I sign up?" Following the visual paths of paintings, listening intently to a musical composition, and reading books, he insists, are analogous to prayer. Cogent and thoughtful, if nostalgic, essays urging our attention not to iPads and smartphones but to art.

Kirkus Reviews