Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994)

I stumbled upon this in my search for readings for my course Media and Minds, and it's a gem. Birkerts first drew me in because of some biographical overlap: growing up the child of European immigrants (in his case, both parents from Latvia, in mine my mother from Germany, but my father, with his rejection of his Irish Catholic background and of American culture and his interest in East Asia, might well have been an immigrant), Birkerts was painfully aware of how he didn't fit in with his peers, and wanted to assimilate. Eventually, however - and this is just my surmise - Birkerts's outsider status has given him a perch from which he castigates the entire drift of our culture in our electonic age. The book is a worthy sequel and complement to Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. Written 10 years after Postman's work, and on the cusp of the internet revolution, Gutenberg Elegies is astonishingly prescient in its picture of what has come to pass: the fracturing of attention and selves, the loss of interiority, etc. First, though, Birkerts gives an account of how "deep reading" (a term he coins here and which Maryanne Wolf, in Reader, Come Home, borrows) - which was on its way out already 30 years ago - allows us to explore other worlds and uncover or invent other selves, other versions of us.