[In the following review, Jardine faults the integrity of Birkerts's polemic in The Gutenberg Elegies, dismissing his prediction of cultural doom from technological advances.]

Sven Birkerts composes his literary essays on an old IBM Selectrix typewriter. He is proud to admit that he understands little about new technology. But he is absolutely sure that the advent of the personal computer marks the end of reading, and that the headlong expansion of the Internet sounds the death knell for the book as we know it.

Enthusiastic reviews of the U.S. edition of The Gutenberg Elegies eloquently testify that plenty of cultivated people will welcome Birkerts's lament, full of foreboding, because it resonates deeply with their own sense of the end of culture. The Bloomsbury Review is quoted: "In my more melancholy mood I hear deeper in The Gutenberg Elegies a most mesmeric music, and I shudder from the resonance these essays generate in my heart."

What is Birkerts so afraid of? Broadly speaking, that the days when we could ask adolescents to read the exquisitely intricate prose of Henry James and William Faulkner with unselfconscious ease and delight may be over. As a teacher I can confirm that he is right, but is he also right to insist (to the point of dogmatism) that nothing culturally enriching has taken, or will ever take, their place? Ask that question of The Gutenberg Elegies and you've tumbled Birkerts. He already knows that the answer is yes.

Birkerts is already sure that the individual reader communing with "great books" (classic fiction down to the turn-of-the-century novel) is the eternal type of the truly cultivated person—the person in touch with "reality", the person with sensitivity and a soul. He knows without looking that all of us who compose on word processors are doing a bad job, that hypertext writing is intrinsically ugly and boring, and that the possibilities for experimenting with written form and content offered by new technology are, of necessity, creatively diminishing.

The Gutenberg Elegies has nothing at all to say about the electronic age, beyond the fact that it is a very bad thing. Birkerts does not bother to consult anyone beyond the 1960s' guru Marshall MacLuhan ("the medium is the message") on the complex implications of the explosion in communication forms. He is happy not to have read those whose writing celebrates new possibilities and expanded horizons. He looks at the graphics in Wired and tut-tuts at its visual seductiveness, but avowedly has no interest in reading the articles in it, which try to explore new creativity.

Instead Birkerts devotes himself to honing his elegant sentences into a shimmering celebration of solitary, introspective writers and readers: "The writing process begins in the writer, the life; it branches off on to paper, into artifice; but the final restless resting place of every written thing is the solitary life of the reader. There it hibernates, a cluster of stray images, forgotten incitements and conversational asides, a mass of shadow wrapping itself around the thoughts and gestures of the self."

The tones are those of Harold Bloom, sometimes plangently reflective, sometimes hectoringly apocalyptic. The message is the same. The man (definitely a man) alone with his book is the guardian of civilisation as we know it. But Birkerts' civilisation is a very particular thing. It is a world of privilege and prejudice that looks nostalgically back to a time when only elite initiates had access to art and literature, when a few mandarins claimed the right to legislate for all of our tastes.

The Gutenberg Elegies is a fundamentally dishonest polemic. Like all champions of the past, Birkerts smugly distorts the arguments of others, because he is without respect for those who make the contrary case. He doesn't mind that his "real" world leaves out anyone who doesn't wish to join the Ivy League club he so cherishes. He doesn't notice how essentially ill-mannered he is as he determinedly refuses to listen to or engage with any arguments outside his own frame of reference. He is curiously comfortable to tell us that he hasn't bothered to read them, while reproaching each one of us for not having read and reread obscure short stories by authors he recognises and respects.

It's odd how the prophets of cultural doom always exempt their personal dependence on progress from their condemnation. I remember vividly when I acquired an IBM Selectrix typewriter in the early 1970s, passed on to me by my father to help me finish writing up my Ph.D. It was the most hitech piece of writing equipment I had ever seen. I was awestruck by its capacity to ease the pains of cutting and pasting text, and to aid my production of flawless pages of limpid prose. I knew that my relationship to writing had changed for ever. I was thrilled. The miracles of technology seemed to me to promise wondrous possibilities for the future. Seated today in front of my Apple Mac, I haven't changed my mind.