Reading Response #3 "The Owl Has Flown"

“What is most conspicuous as we survey the general trajectory of reading across the centuries is what I think of as the gradual displacement of the vertical to the horizontal.”

This quote, from the essay “The Owl Has Flown,” says that we are sacrificing depth of information for the amount of information. Instead of reading the same thing over and over again, we are reading a lot of different things. I believe that the reason the way we read is changing is because life, society and technology is changing. We live in the age of information where speed is everything. It would be unimaginable today if breaking news was three months old. We know about an event almost as soon as it happens. The earthquake in Haiti didn’t take long to reach the newspapers in the US. We don’t achieve depth much anymore today partly because the text doesn’t have it to begin with. News has no depth. It says what it says. We then interpret it, think about some more and then it doesn’t cross our minds again. Why should it? It’s over. Ok, so there was an earthquake in San Francisco in 1906. How does that affect me now? Because it doesn’t, I don’t think about it at all. It has no depth for me to achieve. Novels and such fictitious things have a little depth, but we still read it and move on. If we don’t just move on, we get left behind. The amount of information we would get out of it if we read it over and over again would not be worth the time and effort. I think what Birkerts essay is trying to say is that we don’t take in all the information when we read something. This passage occurs in the beginning of the essay. It explains the idea in another way to help understand the point of the essay. It is important to my understanding of the essay because it sums up the majority of it in one sentence. This essay relates to Clive Thompson’s “The New Literacy.” The New Literacy says that because of technology, we are writing more than any other generation did before. They relate because one says that technology is good, the other says it isn’t. The one that says technology is good says how it is helping us advance our skills in writing. The other states that technology is hindering our ability to fully understand a piece of text. I think Thompson would not agree with Birkerts essay. Even though I understand and see where Birkerts is coming from, I don’t agree with it.