Sven Birkerts, the author of "The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994)", cautioned against interpreting the decline of literary reading in purely quantitative terms, as in, time given to the screen is time away from books. He cited the pervasive cultural changes wrought by the great momentum that underlies our turn to all things digital, as he put it in an e-mail message.
If it's perceptibly harder for me, a dedicated humanist type, to decelerate into a thick book I'm interested in -- harder because I, too, want my results more quickly, in less linear form -- I try to imagine the average 17-year-old who has just been assigned some brick of a novel by her sadistic senior English teacher...
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