SOURCE: "'The Fate of the Book,'" in The Antioch Review, Vol. 54, No. 3, Summer, 1966, pp. 261-72.

[In the following essay, Birkerts speculates about the implications of (he transition from page-centered (book) to screen-centered (on-line) communication in contemporary society.]

I would need the fingers of both hands to track how many times this past year I have been asked to give my thoughts on something called "the fate of the book." I have sat on symposia, perched on panels, opined on-line, and rattled away on the radio—not once, it seems, addressing the fate of reading, or literacy, or imagination, but always that other thing: the fate of the book. Which would be fine, really, except that the host or moderator never really wants to talk about the book—the artifact, the bundle of bound pages—or even much about the class of things to which it belongs. That class of things is of interest to people mainly insofar as it is bound up with innumerable cultural institutions and practices. In asking about the fate of the book, most askers really want to talk about the fate of a way of life. But no one ever just comes out and says so. This confirms my general intuition about Americans, even—or especially—American intellectuals. We want to talk about the big things but we just can't let ourselves admit it.

I begin with this observation because I am, paradoxically, always encountering intelligent people who argue that if we were to leave the book behind, replacing pages with screen displays, we would not be changing very much finally; that people would still read and write, only more efficiently; and that the outlook for education would very likely be improved. There are many people out there who don't make a strong connection between the book and the idea, or culture, of the book. I would say that this connection is everything.

My position in the matter is fairly simple. The fate of the book must be considered side by side with the fate of electronic chip and screen-based technologies. It is only by asking about both that we can see what is happening around us, and to us. Which is, I insist, a total redrawing of the map. Here are changes so fundamental as to force us to redraft our hitherto sacred articles of faith about public and private life.

We make a mistake if we view books and screen technologies as competing for popularity or acknowledged superiority. These are not two approaches to the same thing, but two different things. Books cannot—and should not have to—compete with chip-powered implements.

Nor is there a war going on. It is not as if we are waiting to see what the battlefield will look like once the musket smoke has blown off. No, screens and circuits are here to stay—their empery is growing daily—and the only real question is whether the book will remain, and in what form, and to what end? And: what will it mean when the functions of the book have been superseded, or rewritten as new functions that no longer require paged things, only databases and screen displays?

New functions. That is, in a way, what it all comes down to. The book will disappear, if it does, because the functions and habits for which it is ideally suited will themselves disappear. And what will the world be like then? How will people act toward one another?

Many questions—and here is another: is technology driving the change of functions and habits, or is it the other way around? Could it be that we are changing, evolving, and beckoning that future toward us? The lightbulb was invented, it has been said, when the world was clamoring, like the dying Goethe, for more light. Inventions don't just initiate change—they are themselves responses to changed needs and circumstances.

Maybe we are ready to embrace the pain of leaving the book behind; maybe we are shedding a skin; maybe the meaning and purpose of being human is itself undergoing metamorphosis. I fully accept that my grandchildren will hear me tell of people sitting in rooms quietly turning the pages of books with the same disbelief with which I listened to my grandfather tell of riding in carriages or pitching hay. These images trigger a deep nostalgia in many of us, and we will have a similar nostalgia for the idea of solitary reading and everything it represents.

But evolution is evolution, and no amount of nostalgia can temper its inexorability. We need to look past the accrued associations and longings to see the book in a historical light, as a technology. A need was felt, and the ingenuity arose to meet the need. And so happy was the result that we have great difficulty in letting it go, in facing the fact that the new imperatives now dictate new solutions. These new imperatives do not yet define us, but they may come to. To understand what they are, we need to look closely at both the old technology and the new. For the technology takes the print of our needs and our desires.

How do books and screen technologies differ? Or—and—how will a dominantly electronic culture differ from the print-centered culture we have known these past few centuries? The basic oppositions, we will find, give lie to the claim that screen technologies are only modifications and improvements of the pre-existing.

Closure versus Open-endedness

Whether scholarly or non-, the book has always represented the ideal of completion. The printed text has strived to be standardized, authorized, a summa. Indeed, we may notice that when new materials are added, requiring a "new" or "expanded" edition, the effect is often to compromise the original edition, suggesting retrospectively that its original appearance of authoritativeness was ill founded, its completion spurious, and making us wonder if all such appearances should not be considered skeptically. Similarly, an erratum is like a pimple on an otherwise creamy complexion. The fixity of the word imprinted on the page, and our awareness of the enormous editorial and institutional pressure behind that fixity, send the message that here is a formulation, an expression, that must be attended to. The array of bound volumes on the library shelves communicates that knowledge and understanding are themselves a kind of structure assembled from these parts. The societal imprimatur is manifest in the physical characteristics: the lettering on the spine, the publisher's colophon embossed on the title page.

Screen technologies undo these cultural assumptions implicitly. Stripping the work of its proud material trappings, its solid three-dimensionality, they further subject it to fragmentation. That a work comes to us by way of a circuit means that we think of it as being open—available—in various ways, whether or not we avail ourselves of those ways. We can enter cleanly and strategically at any number of points; we can elide passages or chapters with an elastic ease that allows us to forget the surrounding textual tissue. With a book, the pages we thumb past are a palpable reproach. Whereas the new texts, or texts of the future, those that come via screen, already advertise (many of them) features that fly in the face of definitive closure. The medium not only allows—it all but cries out for—links, glosses, supplements, and the like.

Suddenly it appears that the deconstructionists were the hierophants of the new dispensation. Their questioning of closure, of authority, of the univocal nature of texts, heralded the arrival of a new kind of text—a text made possible by a technology that was only beginning to unfold its possibilities when the first deconstructionist writings were published. How odd, then, to see that the temper of the academy is turning against the theoreticians of the decentered, the polysemous, just as what was indirectly prophesied is coming to pass.

Already we find the idea of boundlessness encapsulated in the technically finite CD-ROM packages that are coming on the market. The structure—the referentiality—is such that one never reads or uses them with the totality in view. One uses them open-endedly, always with the awareness that the options have scarcely been exhausted. This would be true, in a sense, of a print encyclopedia—except, of course, that the material orientation is such that, as a user, you never forget exactly where you have landed and where that situates you with reference to the whole body of text. Fittingly, encyclopedias and compendious reference works have been first in line for transfer onto CD-ROM.

Hierarchy versus the Leveling of Hierarchy

With finality, with closure, there follows ineluctably the idea of canonicity, that great bugbear of the deconstructionists. Where texts are deemed closed and where expressions are seen to strive for finality, it is unavoidable that vertical ranking systems will result. The push to finality, to closure, is also the push for the last word, which is another term for the struggle for vertical ascendancy. If intellectual culture is seen as the product, or benefit, of book learning, then it is the marketplace of ideas that decides which books will shape our thinking and our values. The battle of the books.

But now substitute circuit-driven screen textuality, put mutability and open-endedness in the place of definitiveness, and it's easy to see that notions of hierarchy will be very hard to sustain. In the theoretically infinite database, all work is present and available—and, in a way, equal. Where discourse is seen to be woven and, technologically speaking, collective, the idea of ranking dissipates. New systems of search and access will eventually render the notion of the enclosed work antiquated. Without a system of rigorously closed and definitive authored works the whole concept of hierarchy is useless.

Historical Layering versus Simultaneity

The system of print textuality has always promoted the idea of culture as a matter of tradition and succession, with printed works leading back into time like so many footprints. The library or special collections department gives this notion concrete embodiment. Tracking an idea, an influence, we literally go from newer to older physical texts. The scholar's finger brushes the actual molecules of bygone eras. And historical depth is one of our most powerful metaphors—for centuries it has been our way of figuring the idea of time, of past receding from recent to ancient.

Screen technologies, circuited to their truly mind-boggling databases, work implicitly against the sedimentary paradigm. To plunder the analogy, they are metamorphic: they have the power to transpose the layered recession of texts into a single, vast collection of cross-referenced materials; they change the standard diachronic approach to history to one that is—in the absence of the material markers that are books—synchronic. And in this they further promote the postmodern suspicion of the historical time line or the notion of narrative. The picture of history that data base and screen unscroll is of webs and "trees," a field of relations and connections that eluded earlier historical projections, and that submerges any notion of story (and recall that the etymological root of history is "storia," meaning story), submerges it in vast informational complexity.

But the impact of such a paradigm change is less upon scholars and historians, who certainly don't need to be reminded that historical time is a kind of depth; rather, it will be the generations of students who learn about the past from these connection-rich databases who will, over time, internalize a very different understanding of the past than was held by the many generations preceding them. Is this good, bad, or neither? I naturally incline to the view that while we can never really know the past, or grasp history except fleetingly in the comprehended detail, time past is a powerful Other, a mystery that we never stop trying to solve, one that is closely bound up with our somewhat poetic conception of depth.

The Private Sphere versus the Public Space

Although the technology of the book originally evolved to preserve and transmit information outside the intimate space of the geographical community—a fact that can be understood as giving the word a much larger public—it is also true that book reading is essentially private. This is not only because of the need for self-possessed concentration on the part of the reader, but also because the medium itself—the book—is opaque. The word signifies against the dead-endedness of the paper it is printed on, and in the process of signifying it incessantly enforces the awareness that that word is a missive from an individual sensibility, that its inscription originated in a privacy. Whatever one reads, the act is understood to be a one-to-one communication: Henry David Thoreau or Roland Barthes to myself. In this, reading has always been the verso of writing; the two acts are more intimately bound than we usually imagine them to be.

Reading from a screen invokes, automatically, the circuit system that underwrites all screen transmissions. Again, on a subliminal level the traditional assumptions are modified, undone. The words on the screen, although very possibly the same as the words on the page, are not felt to dead-end in their transmitting element. Rather, they keep us actively aware of the quasi-public transparency out of which they emerge. These words are not found in the way that one can thumb forward in a printed text and locate the words one will be reading. No, they emerge; they are arriving, and from a place, moreover, that carries complex collective associations. To read from a screen—even if one is simply scrolling Walden—is to occupy a cognitive environment that is very different from that which you occupy when reading a book. On a small scale this does not amount to much. But when the majority of reading acts take place at the screen, then we might argue that a blow of some sort has been dealt to solitary subjectivity. Especially as the book has always been more than a carrier of information or entertainment—it has traditionally represented a redoubt against the pressures of public life, a retreat wherein one can regroup the scattered elements of the self.

The other obvious difference between printed and screen-delivered text derives from the fact that chip-driven systems not only allow but encourage collaborative and interactive operations. Texts programmed for CD-ROM are the obvious instance of this, but there is little doubt that we will see more and more of these applications, especially in classroom settings. Which suggests once again that the developments that may strike those of us who are children of the book as exotic will seem perfectly natural to the generation now carrying out its first exploratory mouse clicks. And who will doubt that when reading CD-ROM is normal, reading the linear, missionary-position way will seem just a little bit strange. Moreover, as more and more texts get written on the computer, we will probably see writers experimenting with the new presentation options that the medium accommodates. Though conservatively minded critics may question the aesthetic validity of collaborative hypertext ventures, these ventures will certainly flourish and further undercut the old paradigm of the lone reader turning the pages of some one author's book. Again, this is not just a change in reading modes; it is at the same time a major alteration of our cognitive environment. By degrees we will see much of our intellectual and artistic enterprise move away from strictly private exchange and in the direction of the collective. Maybe the day will come when most of our thought—and its expression—is carried out by teams. The lone creator or thinker will be a figure in our nostalgia banks, a memory preserved on commemorative postage stamps—although the odds are that postage stamps, too, will have vanished into that museum of images that will be the past.

We are moving, then, toward Roland Barthes's "Death of the Author," and toward his idea that texts are not bounded entities, but weavings ("textus" means weaving). The idea that the individual can be a carrier of some relevant vision or message will give way to a suspicion of the individual producer as atavistic romantic. Indeed, the "romantic," bound up as it is with notions about the symbolic agon of the solitary self, is already something of a category of derision. To call somebody a "romantic" nowadays is like calling him a "hippie"—a term that signifies as unambiguously in the cultural sphere as Edsel does in the automotive.

This may seem like a wild extrapolation—and I hope it is—but if one spends some time factoring tendencies, it's hard to get a significantly different outcome. The point is that subjective individualism is on the wane, and that, given the larger dynamics of a circuit-driven mass society, the tendency is more likely to intensify than to abate. Of course, the transition from book to screen that I've been speculating about is not the driving force behind the change—there is no one culprit to finger—but it is certainly part of the system of changes; it stands as yet another instance of what in the larger view has begun to assume an evolutionary character.

Expressive versus Functional Uses of Language

Hand in hand with the shifts noted above—and abetting the move toward the collective/collaborative configuration of our intellectual culture—will be the redefinition of our expressive ideals. That is, our very usage of language will change—as it is already changing—and literary style will be the obvious casualty. This makes perfect sense. Style has always been predicated upon absence and distance. A writer refines a style in order to compensate for the fact that she has nothing but words on the page with which to transmit her thoughts and emotions. Style is, in a sense, the injection of personality into communication, the attempt to leap the gap of time and space using the wings of expressiveness. But as any habitué of the Internet or e-mail user will tell you, style is not of the essence in screen-to-screen communication. For the very premise of this communication is near immediacy. The more we are linked up, the more available we are to each other, the less we need to ponder what Flaubert called the "mot juste." We don't slave over our sentences when we are face-to-face—don't because we can use gesture and inflection, and because we are present to supplement or amend our point if we detect that our listener has not got it right. In this respect, screen communications are closer to conversation than to, say, letters, even though they use the written word as their means of delivery.

So long as we take the view that style is merely an adornment—a superfluous extra—this may not seem like a great loss. There is even a bias in certain quarters that style is some kind of corruption or affectation, that we should prefer Hemingway to Fitzgerald, or Orwell to Nabokov, because less is more and plain speaking is both a virtue and the high road to truth. But this is a narrow and reductive perspective. For not all truths can be sent through the telegraph, and not all insights find a home in the declarative sentence. To represent experience as a shaded spectrum, we need the subtle shading instruments of language—which is to say that we need the myriad refinements of verbal style. This is my fear: that if the screen becomes the dominant mode of communication, and if the effective use of that mode requires a banishing of whatever is not plain or direct, then we may condition ourselves into a kind of low-definition consciousness. There may result an atrophy, a gradual loss of expressions that are provisional, poetic, or subjectively nuanced. We should worry, then, not just about the "dumbing down" that is fast becoming the buzzword for this possibility, but also about the loss of subjective reach. If there is one line of defense against the coming of the herd mentality, it is the private intransigence of individuals, and that intransigence feeds on particularity as a plant feeds on sunlight.

If I am right about these tendencies, about the shift from page-centered to screen-centered communication, then we will be driven either to acquiesce in or to resist what amounts to a significant modification of our patterns of living. Those who assent will either do so passively, because it is easier to move with what appears to be the current of the times, or else they will forge on with zeal because they believe in the promise of the new. Resistors will have to take an active stance—to go against the current, you must use paddles. In both contingents, upstreamers and downstreamers, we will find a small number of people who recognize what is truly at stake, who understand that page and screen are really just an arena where a larger contest of forces is being played out.

Though I class myself as one of the resisters, I think I can see how certain tendencies that I deplore might seem seductive to others. Is there anything intrinsically wrong with viewing the work of culture as fundamentally collaborative rather than as an individual-based enterprise? Have we not made too great a fetish of the book, and too large a cult of the author? Aren't we ready for a change, a new set of possibilities?

Mired as I am in the romance of subjective individualism, in the Emersonian mythos of self-reliance, I cannot concede it. I have my reasons.

Let me begin by appropriating Nicholas Negroponte's now familiar distinction between atoms and bits. A simple definition should suffice. Atoms, though invisible to the naked eye, exist in space; they are the foundation stones of the material order. Bits, by contrast, are digits; they are coded information—arrangements of zeros and ones—and while they pass through appliances made of atoms, they do not themselves have any materiality. They weigh literally nothing. Atoms are like bodies and bits are like the thoughts and impulses that instruct them in their motions. Indeed, we can assert that ideas and the language that expresses them are bits; books are atoms, the bodies that sustain them.

Mr. Negroponte and I agree that we are but in the first flushes of the much-ballyhooed Information Age, and that by the time the gathering momentum has expended itself—a decade or two hence—the world will look and feel and be utterly different from the more slowly evolving place we all grew up in. Atoms will, of course, still exist—after all, we are significantly atoms, and computers themselves are atoms. But the determining transactions in our lives will happen mainly by way of bits. Images, impulses, codes, and data. Screen events and exchanges that will, except for those who refuse—and some will—comprise an incessant agitation through one whole layer of the implicated self. For many this will bring a comforting sense of connectedness—they will be saying good-bye to the primal solitude that all but defined selfhood down through the millennia. The citizen of the not-so-distant future will always be, in sense, on-line; she will live inside an envelope of impulses. And to be on-line thus is to no longer be alone. This will be less and less a world hospitable to old-style individualism; that will be seen to have been an evolutionary phase, not a human given.

The relevance of this admittedly grand projection to the fate of the book should be starting to come clear. The book as we know it now—the printed artifact that holds in its pages the writer's unique vision of the world, or some aspect of it—is the emblem par excellence of our threatened subjectivity. The book represents the efforts of the private self both at the point of origin, in the writer, and at the point of arrival, in the reader. That these are words on a page and not a screen has enormous symbolic significance. As I have suggested, the opaque silence of the page is the habitat, the nesting place, of the deeper self.

This is a bit abstract, and I will have to get more abstract still before coming around full circle. The book, you see, the tangible paper item, the very ink shapes of the words on the page—these are things. Atoms. But what the atoms are configured to convey—what gives value to the book—is the intangible element. The bit. In this way alone the book is a primitive computer, or an analogue to brain and mind. Visions and thoughts and their expression in language have never been atomic. They are about the atomic, the material, at least in very large part. Though they are without dimension or gravity, bits refer mainly to entities that have both.

Well, you might say, if this is true, then what is all the fuss about? What's the difference whether the content of these bits comes across on the page or on the screen? How can I argue that the digital future threatens anything that really matters?

I have two thoughts on this.

On a micro scale, I would propose that a significant, if highly elusive, part of the reading operation is marked by the transfer from atom to bit. The eye motion converts the former to the latter. The printed word becomes a figment in the mind much as water becomes vapor. There is a change of state, one that is a subthreshold part of the reading transaction. Words on a screen, already part of the order of bits, are not made to undergo this same fundamental translation. There is a difference in process. When we read from a screen, or write directly onto a screen (without printing out), we in fact never cross the border from atom to bit, or bit to atom. There is a slight, but somehow consequential, loss of gravity; the word is denied its landing place in the order of material things, and its impact on the reader is subtly lessened.

"Ridiculous!" you say. To which I can only reply that outwardly nothing about our fiscal processes changed when we went off the gold standard (nobody but tourists ever saw the vaults at Fort Knox), but that an untethered dollar feels different, spends differently, than one secured by its minim of bullion.

On a macro scale, I am also preoccupied with the shifting of the ground of value. By moving increasingly from A to B—from atom toward bit—we are severing the ancient connection between things and their value. Or if not that, then we are certainly tipping the sacred ontological scales. Bits are steadily supplanting atoms. Meaning what? Meaning that our living has gradually less to do with things, places, and human presence, and more to do with messages, mediated exchanges, ersatz environments, and virtual engagements of all descriptions. It is hard to catch hold of this by looking only at the present. But try a different focal adjustment. Think about life in America in the 1950s in terms of these fundamentals and then project forward to the millennium, now less than five years away.

You cannot fail to note how that balance has shifted—from the thing to its representation, from presence to mediation. And if this is the case, then life, the age-old subject matter of all art, cannot be rendered in the same way anymore. The ground premises of literature—indeed of all written content—are altered, or need to be, for everything is altered. Instead of bits referring simply to atoms, we find more and more that bits refer to other bits. If the book is a mirror moving alongside our common reality, then the future of the book—and of writer and reader—is tied to that reality.

When we ask about the future—the fate—of the book, I interpret this to mean not just the artifact, but a whole kind of sensibility. Questions about that future are, really, larger questions about ourselves. How will we live? Who will we be? What will be the place of the private self in the emergent new scheme of things?

Myself, I see no shame in the label "romantic" and I will not accept that it is now unfashionable to be tilting at windmills. The idea that the book has a "fate" implies, in some way, the fait accompli. And while I believe that there is a strong evolutionary tendency underlying our moment-to-moment dealings and decisions, I don't believe that it is pointless to counter or protest that tendency. My instinct, signaling from some vestigial part of the psyche, tells me to avoid placing all my faith in the coming of the chip-driven future. It bids me to question the consequences of the myriad promised simplifications and streamlinings and to stall somehow the rush to interconnectivity, that comes—as all interconnectivity must—at the expense of the here and now. Certainly the survival of that archaic entity called the soul depends on resistance. And soul or not, our remaining individuals depends on our keeping the atom-to-bit ratio weighted, as it ever has been, toward the atom. Otherwise we are in danger of falling into a dream that is not ours or anybody else's, that spreads inexorably on the legs of its ones and zeroes.