Appendix A: Argued Differences between Print and E-literacies?

Taken from Sven Birkett's The Guttenberg Elegies.

Print Literacy

E-literacies
Order is linear, bound to logic by syntax. Order is non-linear, not bound to logic by syntax.
Requires active engagement of reader's attention. Can be passive or interactive
Engagement is essentially private. Engagement is essentially public, taking place within a circuit of larger connectedness
Posits a time axis, a forward-moving succession. Basic movement is laterally associative rather than vertically cumulative
Material is static. Contents are felt to be evanescent
Arrangement of print accords with our traditional sense of history. Works against traditional historical perception, which depend on the notions of logic and sequential succession

Sven Birkett's Predictions in Gutenberg Elegies

  1. Language erosion. Complexity and distinctiveness of spoken and written expression will be replaced by "plainspeak"--a telegraphic, linguistic prefab devoid of figurative richness, subtlety, and wit. Expect curricula to be further streamlined; complex texts in the humanities pruned and glossed. "The greater part of any articulate person's energy will be deployed in dumbing-down her discourse."
  2. Flattening of historical perspective. Perceptions of history will necessarily change. Tied to the "book," our sense of the past will become a body of disjunct data available for retrieval and mythology. "The database, useful as it is, expunges this context, this sense of chronology, and admits us to a weightless order in which all information is equally accessible."
  3. The waning of the private self. As the concept of subjective space changes, so will the self change. Rather than autonomous, private products of the book, we will become captives of the web, a web with infinite strands, growing daily in sophistication. "We will bring our terminals, our modems, and menus further and further into our former privacies; we will implicate ourselves by degrees in the unitary life, and there may come a day when we no longer remember that there was any other life."

Nick Lilly
lilly@vms.tarleton.edu