I completely agree with the Birkerts aticle. I don't think it is a technophobic behaviour to claim that the era of the printed text is slowly dying and to be sad about that. I share most of Birkerts idea but I am myself a big user of computer and electronic things in general.

It was quite ironic to read this article on a computer screen! I haven't been a great reader during my whole life but I have to admit that since I have started reading more and more books, I find that there is nothing to compare between reading a printing book and reading on a screen. First, I don't know about you but purely physically, I have to make many breaks or my eyes gets worse and worse and almost painful. Then, I think that I am much more concentrated into my reading when I'm turning the pages, touching the paper, all that experience about going through a book that Birkerts explains in the article.

I don't think that Landow argument to counter that is very accurate. He talks about this person who "displayed Ben Johnson's own copie of Euclid...". You don't have to hold a priceless book to feel special. I am generally very attached even to a cheap book that I have bought or that I have been offered.

And to finish on a complete esthetic argument : look how a library is more beaufiful than a hard disk!

This first paragraph leads me to a parallel that may not be the most accurate but I think it can be done.

Birkerts talks a little bit about it when he talks about the power of images on the youth today, and espacially television. The electronic technologies today give an impression of entire accessibility to the rest of the world and an impression of a better understanding and knowledge. ("The fareway rest of the world has been transformed by a pure possibility of access" Birkerts p 64).

I think that this impression of pure access to the rest of the world is completely superficial and a big illusion.

Someone told me something interesting this week end, and here comes the explanation of these pictures. I met a photographer in Minneapolis, who  was telling me about his trip in Paris. He told me that he was not in the first place very interested in seeing all the touristic attractions and that he prefered experiencing the city through walking and talking to people and going out at night and things like that. However, during one of his random walk, he finally ran into the Eiffel Tower, and to use his words "he never felt something like that". He has been litteraly impressed and fascinated. I think that the Eiffel Tower, like the Statue of Liberty for example, are probably the things that almost everyone in the world have seen in photos, and everyone believe they know "what it is", but this conversation proved me that the real experience is so much more powerful.

As Magritte wrote on his painting (and this is my last picture) : this is not a pipe (this is the picture of a pipe). I think many of you are familiar with this painting and I use it as a conclusion... The electronic technologies (or texts in our cases) cannot replace and make you feel what you would feel with a actual printed text or a real experience.