While this probably bespeaks more of myself and my reading than of Sven Birkerts and his essay "Into the Electronic Millenium," the work at first seems rife with a doomsday-ish foreboding. From his "first serious inkling that all was not well in the world of print and letters" to the "morbid symptoms" of "a society that has begun to come loose from its textual moorings," my sentiments tended to lie with our (nearly vilified) homogeneous planet where "every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place" (391, 392, 394, 392).

After having been overfed for months on the media-hyped Y2K pap, I was not a bit hungry. Indeed, the word-signifier "skeptical" would serve its language function as precisely the term to describe my near agitation towards this sort of doom and gloom philosophy. This may well be for reasons neither I nor my therapist can understand, but there appears to be a connection to my childhood, replete with fallout shelters, anti-Communist propaganda, and the constant buzz in the background of that infernal contraption--the television.

Soon enough, Birkerts begins his Modernistic twinge. Quoting Gramsci, he resorts to the rhetorical coupling "morbid symptoms," speaking of change as if it were some horrific encounter between the old and new in which the new supplants the old to the detriment of all that is held dear by civilization. Never mind the constancy of change and its inevitable occurrence. Forget the evolutionary concept of existence. It seems that Birkerts would have us forget change altogether while hunkering down in a heap of books.

Not that my attitude here couldn't use a little change itself. There is no rational point in such a dramatic response to one person's opinion. Deciding to take a break a few pages into the composition, I start to understand where Birkerts is coming from. It becomes so clear. He is actually upset at the postmodern paradigm shift necessitated by the advent of deconstruction, which has offered recourse through discourse for those indoctrinated into the "Western tradition" (394), having had super-imposed upon their hearts and minds a whole canon of historical and literary material at odds with any view other than that forced upon them.

At any rate, I allow Birkerts another page or so, being fascinated with all of this postmodern theory business, both pro and con. I too engage in "this debate [that] could only have taken the form it has in a society that has begun to come loose from its textual moorings." I, however, find the challenges to language, literature, and yes even "history itself," to be refreshing rather than "idiotic" and will at this point give Birkerts' my sympathy (394).

Where he finds displacement/entrapment under the "communications net, a soft and pliable mesh woven from invisible threads [that] has fallen over everything," I find release in "reweaving the entire social and cultural web." And I often feel elation towards the "collective change of sensibility" which Birkerts suggests has turned us into virtual incompetents who "are not made of the same stuff that their elders are" because we are "incessantly repositioning the self within a barrage of on-rushing stimuli." In other words: distracted confused dispersed and unfocused (391, 393, 395, 395).

As with any honest effort, Birkerts' deserves a voice. And I've trusted to find something of merit here amid his values-laden essay. So, much as I have avoided expressing this until now, his work causes me to think about his suppositions. I have faced the possibilities: "language erosion" by syntactical disintegration; "flattening of historical perspectives" as the database replaces the accumulated volumes of the library; "waning of the private self" as it becomes enmeshed in the ever thickening network of "codes, wires, and pulsations... terminals, modems, and menus" (396, 397, 397, 398).

This bleak outlook leaves one cold. It focuses sharply on what has been lost, what is changing, and what will be slipping away. Pecking away on this keyboard, a nostalgic glow offers some warmth. A resin paper-weight, styled after an old-fashioned typewriter, sits on the desk before me. In his conclusion, Birkerts finally points towards a brighter horizon, and I meet him there. For I'll assume that "language is a hardier thing...flourish[ing] among the beep and the click and the monitor" (398). And so it is....