In Praise of Print: Why Reading Remains Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse

When the witty and wry English fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett interviewed Bill Gates for GQ in 1995, only 39% of Americans had access to a home computer. According to the Pew Research Center, the number who were connected to the internet was a paltry 14%. At the dawn of the internet age, when optimistic bromides about the information superhighway to the 21st century were replete in politics and culture, the author of the “Discworld” series was less sanguine.

While talking to the CEO of Microsoft, Pratchett asked what would happen if a writer disseminated on the internet something atrocious and libelous, say a pseudo-academic work of Holocaust denial. “There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net,” said Pratchett, “there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.” Predictably, Gates denied the threat of any sort of epistemological collapse. Without offering any mechanism for doing so, the billionaire told the author that “you will have authorities on the net… The whole way that you can check somebody’s reputation will be so much more sophisticated.” Google was three years into the future—Facebook would be founded in nine years—Twitter in eleven. If Pratchett seemed sardonic and cynical in 1995, then Gates’ pollyannish, Panglossian exuberance appears positively psychotic three decades later.

Pratchett’s warning may have been lonely during that distant age of unbridled tech-enthusiasm, but he wasn’t the only Cassandra warning about reality through a smartphone screen darkly. Astrophysicist Carl Sagan predicted in his 1995 The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark that “when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few… [and] when the people have lost their ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority” the nation would “slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

For many readers in the previous century’s last decade, after the vanquishing of Soviet communism and the seemingly never-ending ascendancy of the American experiment, the arc of the moral universe had turned in part because of the supposedly liberatory power of technology. What Pratchett and Sagan prophesized, however, was a coming tumultuousness, not an end of history but rather the demise of truth. Less of a computer revolution than a computer apocalypse.

Before Pratchett or Sagan—before social media and the smart phone, bot farms and artificial intelligence—there was Sven Birkerts’s damning The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Released thirty years ago on December 1, Birkerts challenged the coming digital transformation when it was still a gleam in the eye of men like Gates (and long before Zuckerberg or Musk). As a manifesto, The Gutenberg Elegies was in opposition to the prevailing utopianism of the ‘90s, seeing in the denigration of physical books an irreparable harm.

In the author’s estimation, the ceding of material books to the ephemeral gauze of the online posed a threat to our attention, to the ability of immersing ourselves within complex narrative or engaging in the almost-transcendent flow of reading. “Everything in contemporary society discourages interiority,” writes Birkerts. “More and more of our exchanges take place via circuits, and in their very nature those interactions are such as to keep us hovering in the virtual now, a place away from ourselves.” If true in 1994, how much more accurate today? As an antidote to the virtual obliteration of the self, Birkerts returns to literature, arguing that in the “slow and meditative possession of a book,” what he calls “deep reading,” we are able to “keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.”

Many critics disparaged Birkerts as a fussy Luddite. The anonymous reviewer at Kirkus denounced Birkerts as an “inveterate bookworm,” a “curmudgeon” who offered a “simplistic and unconvincing jeremiad.” Wen Stephenson at the Chicago Review claimed that the medium is not the message, describing how he experienced no difference in parsing Seamus Heaney on the page as opposed to the screen, asking “does it matter that it is transmitted to me, voice and word, through a computer? …the question is beginning to bore me by now.” Dean Blobaum of the University of Chicago Press castigated how The Gutenberg Elegies makes electronic media the “whipping boy for the ills of western society,” claiming that Birkerts’ argument is too all-encompassing, blaming computers for the “Decline in education, literacy, and literate culture.” Here’s the thing some thirty years later, however—Birkerts was right.

Central to the negative reviews was a misunderstanding of just how different information hashed through the internet would be when compared with the physical codex, that venerable two-millennia old technology. The Kirkus reviewer, for example, imagines a straw-Birkets at various hinge moments in the past, who inveighs against the “ballpoint, the typewriter, the printing press.” What this critique misses are that those were technologies of production, but the internet is also a technology of reception. The frenetic, interconnected, hypertext-permeated universe of digital reading is categorically a different experience. Even more importantly, a physical book on a shelf is a cosmos unto-itself, while that dimension of interiority and introspection—of privacy—is obscured in the virtual domain.

“If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more than I value the specific contents,” argued Birkerts, and perhaps that seemed precious three decades ago, but it strikes me as invaluable today. After all, reading itself remains literally central to our existence, maybe more so now than at anytime in history. Our digital lives are mediated through words, whether the tumult of Twitter or the doom-scrolling of Reddit, the ever-present ping of texts and the flux of Facebook. Yet this is an estimably different experience than the immersion in Wuthering Heights or Moby-Dick, Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses. What’s been sacrificed is not reading in the most prosaic sense, but the particular experience of a certain type of reading, perilously endangered among all of us attracted to the alluring siren-call of the smartphone ping.

Readerly “flow” allows for a submersion in another way of being, an expansion of possibilities and consciousness. It would be foolish to make that hackneyed, didactic argument that great literature produces good people—too many Nazis read Goethe and Schiller, after all—but to abandon deep reading is to jettison something intrinsic, precious, and singular. “I read novels to indulge in a concentrated and directed inner activity that parallels—and thereby tunes up, accentuates—my own inner life,” writes Birkerts. As much drawn to the digital void as is anybody else alive right now, I’ve had to focus my attention on reading, to prepare myself for dwelling amidst these strange places called novels, and that conscious dedication of time has made immeasurable difference.

Without that dedication—which is simply exercised desire—I’d have not recently ambled through the centuries-old haunted house that is the main character in Daniel Mason’s North Woods nor would I have been dizzied to be in the unreliable consciousness of the spy Sadie Smith in Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, travelled across the immeasurable expanse of Eurasia in the years after the Great War with Pinto in Aleksander Hemon’s The World and All that it Holds, or become familiar with the dozens of very human characters in Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road, from beleaguered Gen-X art history professors to human trafficked Polish immigrants, British Lords to East London hip-hop artists, a universe in its entirety, contained between two covers of stiff cardboard and eternalized on 624 pages. Books are capable of altering Birkerts’ vaunted interiority, of bending the space-time continuum. As Katya Apekina writes in Mother Doll, another universe I visited this year, “Time does not exist…but it’s interminable.”

Birkerts isn’t necessarily a print mystic, but I am. Mine is an estimably materialist variety of mysticism though, for meaning is the ghost within the machine of the book. Appropriate that Gutenberg, that German gold-miner by training, was inspired to create the matrix of movable print after seeing a similar mechanism used to press grapes into wine, both contraptions intended to distill spirits of-a-sort. The ephemerality of the internet is attractive to entropy, for how much of what’s been written over the past few decades has all but vanished, our prodigious output a daily burning of the Library of Alexandria, while stone, papyrus, vellum, and paper can endure for centuries. A printed book is a living animal with flesh of paper and ink of blood, so that compared to turning pages, mere scrolling is anemic.

The internet is, regardless of the encomiums of its most fervent supporters, also a physical realm. Despite being composed of silicon and copper, soldering and circuit boards, the internet is still described as an ethereal, disembodied, spiritual realm. This fallacy has been present for nearly a third-of-a-century and embraced with disturbing zealousness by Silicon Valley’s most cracked digital occultists. But mere affectation doesn’t draw me to the book, but that it’s superior at what it does. The codex on which the architecture of the book is still defined remains an essential technology.

Irene Vallelejo in Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World quips that the codex is the rare device that a time traveling classical Roman would recognize, the book included alongside shovels and axes in basically appearing the same over the centuries. What makes the book perfect, and thus not in need of change, isn’t its appearance (they can be both beautiful and ugly), their price (they’re both expensive and cheap), or their sturdiness (some last forever, others not so much), but rather their ability to disconnect. That is the source of the interiority that Birkerts describes, that books are not mired in the cacophony of the internet.

Among the most poignant scenes in contemporary literature, ever pertinent today, is Winston Smith in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four cradling his paper diary out of view of the panopticon of his telescreen and privately writing down his opinions. Except the telescreen isn’t all-seeing, it’s downright primitive compared to contemporary surveillance capitalism, where Big Brother doesn’t eavesdrop but Alexa does. By contrast, printed books are a zone of resistance against the neon god of the algorithm since tinkering with code can’t delete their contents, as hackers recently did with the Internet Archive. There is a safety to books, where Smith is able to enter the private realm of literature simply by sitting a bit off camera. That’s a freedom which, I fear, will become increasingly rare.

When we speak of twentieth-century totalitarianism we often due so with a sense of naivety, as if the worst of the past was safely ensconced there, mistaking technological progress with liberty. Now, consider what the Nazis were able to do with flimsy IBM punch cards, and the difference today, the sheer amount of data concerning all of us, saved on servers owned by the very people now enabling authoritarianism. “If literature is to survive,” wrote Birkerts, “it must become dangerous”—it increasingly is. More importantly, if we’re to survive, then we must become literate, again.