reading response

In Clive Thompsons article “The New Literacy” he argues that technology has giving writers a ”different sense of what constitutes good writing,” and I am inclined to agree. Modern technology has provided people of all ages the opportunity and avenue to better express themselves. These online accounts like Facebook and twitter, even email, has brought writing into a whole new realm where we are more aware of our tone and our audience.
In “The Owl Has Flown,” by professor Sven Birkerts, he claims that “we are destroying deep time. Not by design, perhaps, but inadvertently.’ He persists, “where electronic impulse rules, and where the psyche is conditioned to work with data, the experience of deep time is impossible.”(33)
Birkerts is insisting that we do indeed live in a world ruled by what I like to call ‘electronic leashes’. Our Blackberrys, iphones and even our televisions have become shortcomings, strapping us to their helm, shattering our social grace. That we have forsaken any real connection with our writing for a short lived connection to a machine. For so long writing was vertical, extending deeper into understanding the true meaning of what we were presented with but somewhere over the last century there has been a shift and we have moved away from the deep meaning into a more horizontal or monotonous way of writing and understanding. And in this apparent shift I presume Birkerts is implying that we have lost a piece of the human connection
I believe that there is a deeper meaning and time to be found in these new methods of writing. If we know to whom we are writing for and how we want to be received then one could argue that there is a window being left open for resonance to flourish and the concept of deep time to persist. What better connection is there then when your audience not only hears you but feels your meaning? That is the very essence of deep time.