Readers Response #3 "The Owl Has Flown"

In the article “The Owl Has Flown” Sven Birkerts claims that reading has greatly changed over the course of humanity and most people today get far less meaning from a single piece of text than we used to. He explains that reading and thinking have always gone hand in hand but our era of technology has changed the fundamentals of reading and how it affects us as a society. According to Birkerts, in the Middle Ages most people read out loud even to themselves and only had a few books, which they read and analyzed over and over. News was slow to spread and most villages were greatly isolated from the next. In our modern world the amount of texts available to us is staggering. Thanks to social networking and the media, we have the ability to see events happening half way across the world moments after they occur. Birkerts however doesn’t see our technological upgrades and volumes of new reading material as necessarily being a good thing. He believes that people today speed through texts and then move on to the next thing without pause and we are losing our ability to analyze what we read in any sort of depth. We are gaining knowledge but losing wisdom and in today’s society there is no time to simply stop and think.

Birkerts states in his essay “The old growth forests of philosophy have been logged and the owl of Minerva as fled. Wisdom can only survive as a cultural ideal where there is a possibility of vertical consciousness. Wisdom has nothing to do with the gathering or organizing of facts-this is basic. Wisdom is seeing through facts,”. I think this quote is basically saying that over time our ability to get a deeper meaning out of what we read has waned. Our fast paced society makes deep analytical thinking a rare occurrence and therefore while we may have gained more knowledge. We have lost the ability to comprehend it. I think that this passage is one of the most important in the essay because it shows the conditions in which wisdom and contemplation can be allowed to endure. Then goes on to compare what Birkerts thinks we would consider to be wisdom in our society today (organizing of facts) and what wisdom actually is (seeing through facts). However, despite Birkerts compelling argument against what our relationship between reading and thinking has become, I believe that some would disagree. I read “Reading A Video Text” by Clive Thompson and I think that Thompson would disagree with what Sven Birkerts is saying. Thompson argues that students today are “In the midst of a literacy revolution” and I believe that Thompson would agree with me when I say that in order for that to happen, wouldn’t writers today have to be better textual analysts instead of worse.