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Shareby Sven Birkerts
The American Scholar (Spring 2010)
“Notes on why the novel and the Internet are opposites, and why the latter both undermines the former and makes it more necessary… The nature of transition, how change works its way through a system, how people acclimate to the new—all these questions. So much of the change is driven by technologies that are elusive if not altogether invisible in their operation. Signals, data, networks. New habits and reflexes. Watch older people as they try to retool; watch the ease with which kids who have nothing to unlearn go swimming forward. Study their movements, their aptitudes, their weaknesses. I wonder if any population in history has had a bigger gulf between its youngest and oldest members.”
