Mr. Birkerts and the fallacies of a closed mind

“Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate,

but that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.

We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant,

gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous?....

….And, as we let our own light shine, we consciously give

other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our fear,

our presence automatically liberates others.”

-Marianne Williamson

         Birkerts deepest fear is the light, the light that radiates from the age of technology. He fears that reading will exit its dark home of the book and shed light. The technology age is the monster that will do this; that will bring literature to light. In using words that connote the dichotomy between light and dark, we are shown his experience in the battle between book and e- book. In truth the e-book is not entirely correct in shedding light on its leather bound brother just as the book is somewhat selfish in keeping his touch screen brother in the dark.

Page v. Screen Chief Justice- Mr. Birkerts

: A page is a beautiful thing crafted by nature and passed to its Homo-Sapiens brother who will be able to run his sensitive fingertips along the page. “How can a piece of writing have simple ideas and still infect the reader with the exciting of its thinking?” (11) A page you can read, a page forces the mind to imagine, to create. When you read with a book in your hand you are being leisurely, relaxed, intellectual. You are an individual, you are alone, you can get lost in a book, and you can hide in a book. 

We prosecute the evil screen and technological device and its defacing of the society the page has created. You watch a screen, it comes to thy lazy self, it entertains thy self that doth not know how to be entertained. It is cowardly commercial, collective, and horribly social. It sheds light on simplicity and mass-produces shallow thinking.

Screen is sentenced to be diminished!

Case Closed (thud thud thud goes the Mr. Birkerts gavel)

My dear sir you are wrong. You are scared of the “Metamorphosis of the familiar.” (15) You have diminished technology to your Disney standards of, “mass-produced entertainment.” (29)

In reality, screen is a technology just as books were and are still today! Mr. Birkerts simply has the technology of books embedded as what he knows as his familiar. He does not take the technology generation into consideration. He is part of the book generation and finds a book familiar, just as any youth today finds technology to be familiar. We now live in a world where the horrors of being connected and social are and can be used to the utmost advantage. Today technology enables people to get any book in the world in the palm of their hand with a push of a button. Why is he so selfish to have a genuine hatred towards the collective sharing of what he holds so dear?

I am rather offended by Mr. Birkerts preaching’s, they are completely subjective. Yes there are certain nuances that give each technology and the classic their advantages, but why make them enemies? I am an overwhelmingly visual learner and hold documentaries so dear to myself. I can watch one documentary and retain more information than I would if I read 10 books. Does he dislike photography as well? “A picture is worth a thousand words.” - Napoleon Bonaparte. It is immature to say that new technological mediums of art are just as mindless as Disney movies and even to say that the works of Walt Disney himself are mindless. It is not to say that Birkerts does not have valid points in his expressions of the wonders of reading a written word on a page, but it can easily be said that he needs to open his mind and realize that shedding light on everything that he preaches can be a beautiful thing. It is the technology that we will pass on to the next generation and many generations to come, just as books have been passed on to many generations and continue to be passed on.


Just as Mr. Birkerts needs to be more open minded of the technology to come, the generation of the technology to come needs to be more openminded of technologies that served as a foundation for past generations.