Reading Response to Birkerts "The Owl Has Flown"

My main idea or focus on the in class essay I had wrote about Clive Thompson and the New Literacy was that technology is helping students improve their writing through new forms of communication, via the internet. My arguement was that the internet through blogs and other writing forums allows underground and aspiring writers to express their views and opinions to the masses without having to even state your name or where you reside which adds a sort of mystery and excitment to a persons writing. In the conclusion paragraph of my essay i stated that if you were to look beyond the small details and look at the big picture, that you would understand how helpfull the internet has been since its appearance.
In "The Owl Has Flown," by Sven Birkerts, he states that wisdom can only survive as a cultural ideal where there is a possibility of vertical consciousness."(Pg. 33) He also says that "Wisdom is a seeing through facts, a penetration to the underlying laws and patterns," (Pg. 33) Which leads me to believe that he thinks the same way i do, but about a different topic. He believes that people in the present day skim through texts and writings without a consciousness of the actual meaning or depth of the text. Also stated in his writing, was the idea that since there was less text and books, that people would re-read books in order to grasp the bigger meaning. I think that Sven Birkerts needs to see the bigger picture in another sense by re-thinking and re-analyzing his ideas to see how helpfull the internet has been to people. My opinion is that the internet allows faster transmition of information, and that the amount of books and writing material gives way to a more cultured understanding of different forms of text and writing. Whereas back when people only had a few forms of text and books to read, people could have been turned off by the few forms of readable material.
Birkerts Essay hasnt changed my opinion, yet i can understand where he is coming from, as he notices that people were able to grasp a deper meaning in the few books they had read. Still, I think that rather than grasping a deeper meaning of one book it is just as easy, if not easier to start to understand books through variety. Basic knowledge through variety helps build on your perception of depth in books, I believe. Reading Birkerts essay helped me strenghthen my ideas through some of his conclusions.