In the essay I wrote in class I discussed how it is important to engage your audience and keep them interested in what you are writing. This can be done easier when you are able to develop a personal connection with your audience. I looked at the article by Clive Thompson in which he asserts that due to technology, today’s students have become better at writing to their audience. He asserts that because of the volume of writing students now do, and the way that writing speaks directly to their audience it is closer to the “Greek tradition of argument”. Basically technology today has caused people to do much more writing, and therefore they have become better at it.
Sven Birkerts writes in his essay “The Owl Has Flown”, about the flip side of this argument. Looking at it from the perspective of the reading we do today instead of the writing we do, he states “In our culture access is not a problem, but proliferation is. And the reading act is necessarily different than it was in its earliest days. Awed and intimidated by the availability of texts, faced with the all but impossible task of discriminating among them, the reader tends to move across surfaces, skimming, hastening from one site to the next without allowing the words to resonate inwardly.” (Pg. 30) In other words Birkerts believes that technology had changed the way we read, and not for the better. He says that people no longer find meaning in the things that they read because they read so much.
Birkerts essay really struck a cord with me because I am an avid reader. I have always thought of this as a good thing. Now I am seeing this in a slightly different light. I have always read for pleasure, never really looked for anything deep or enlightening. I do read my Bible, but I must admit that I don’t do it often or in the way that he describes in his essay as “ferocious reading”, which is to say intensely, developing depth within the text. I cannot say that I have found a deeper resonance within the things that I read, only that I read to fill the boredom. It is very easy to finish one book and move onto the next, and the next, and the next. Perhaps now I will pause awhile before moving on, maybe search a little longer for content before searching for pleasure. Maybe if I change the way I read, I will improve the way I write. It’s something to think about.