Reading Response - Birkerts

In my in-class English essay I explained that writing a response is a "conversation". And that this conversation must be fair. It must be fair in that the person responding must accurately represent the person he or she is responding to. Also, that your response isn't just a list of the original writers ideas, nor just a list of your own.
The main theme of my essay was having to do with technology, and how it has changed our society. In some aspects for the better, and some for the worse. I believe that it has changed us for the better in that we can now use technology to write essays and articles faster than ever. We may also transfer our writing across the globe in a matter of seconds. Any older method of transportation could hardly boast such speed. However, technology has changed us for the worse as well. Many argue that it has made modern writers lazy (which may be much closer to the truth than most may think), and some believe that the shorthand commonly used in facebook, blogs, or myspace, will eventually degrade our ability to write professionally.
I believe that this change in technology and how we access it can be best summarized by Sven Birkerts. Birkerts states, "In our culture, access is not a problem, but proliferation is. And the reading act is necessarily different than it was in the earliest days."
Birkerts point is that literature and writing is easy to access through the technology that we have available. Getting people to use those resources may be more of a problem.
Birkerts quote supports my original ideas, and it also adds a new twist on them. It supports my original statement that technology is indeed changing how we write and even how others read that writing.