With only a few exceptions, we could state that every change produces certain fears. Changes scare us because they imply we will have to deal with something different from what we are used to, and therefore, it means we will have to start a process of learning a new system in order to still be competent. Society evolves, and the human being, based on experience and research offers us new options that supposedly improve the way we did things before, saving us time and effort; in other words, making us more productive.
Changes can, obviously, be for better or for worse. And even the good ones have a negative counter effect. Take for instance the car: it surely saves time as a transportation method if we compare it to the horse, but it causes more ecological damage and it has a higher risk of accident. Furthermore, if we look back in history, we can easily find inventions that should never have been brought to light, like for instance, the nuclear weapons; in spite of the fact that many people claim that the fear of the devastating effect of these new weapons might stop humanity from going into a III World War.
Having all these factors in mind Birkerts position and point of view towards the switch from the printed text to the hypertext is understandable. He looks at the imminent fading out of the book culture with melancholy and he is afraid of the consequences of the coming new era, even though, not only at the time of the writing of the article (1994) but even now we still seem to be victims trapped in the middle of a “period of overlap”, and therefore, we are not fully enabled to foresee the future of the next decades. As the author of the text puts it, we are in a “proto-electronic” moment. While the reading of a printed text is a linear action and it is defined by Birkerts as a private engagement, the text on the screen, it is not linear any more, or at least the electronic order stops it from potentially being so. On the other hand the screen text is interactive, and therefore, we should talk about a public engagement.
All in all, it is hard for us to decide which one is better, and if the advantages of the hypertext outrun its disadvantages. Birkerts states that the print medium exalts the word and brings permanence, against the data on a computer or on the net. This is an arguable statement, since books also deteriorate with time, and a properly saved computer data could last for decades without suffering the unavoidable effects of erosion. However, it is true that all these new CD-ROM Media sets with all this new ways to approach Shakespeare, or other historical characters or facts, overflows the reader with explanatory footnotes (links) and information, and makes more difficult the direct encounter and experience with the raw text of, for instance, an Old English play of sonnet. This could become an obstacle for the development of thinking, the forging of new ideas and the way a reader struggles to understand and build up new theories as the natural reaction or impulse that a difficult to understand verse or line could cause on us.
The other clear issue is the new relationship that is being created between the person and the web. There is a tendency to get hooked on the web, and although this can bee seen as a development of the interactivity, and therefore, as a promotion of the output of the ideas that otherwise might remain in our mind, it can also delude the private self, and the capacity to be comfortable with ourselves. Quoting the author: The expansion of electronic options is always at the cost of contractions in the private sphere. We will soon be navigating with ease among cataracts of organized pulsations, putting out and taking in signals. We will bring our terminals, our modems, and menus further and further into our former privacies; we will implicate ourselves by degrees in the unitary life, and there may come a day when we no longer remember that there was any other life. We could say that this argument collides against Lévy’s theory on the advantage of the transition from natural language to semantic numbers as a positive shift.
On the other hand, Birkerts thoughts of research on natural science and science of cultures complement Becker’s idea of the science of culture as an individual act that needs a context, and needs understanding the opaque. Media substitutes this opacity for transparency, but it actually just gives us an illusion of understanding, that can be misunderstood with the illusion of access, and is at the same time with the "anticontextual". This new media can also atrophy our minds, and shorten our memory capacity, since the mastering of the new technology will provide us with a know-how of how to access the information but not helping us to retain it. And this could be bad if we think that possessing information is the base of intelligence, because it allows us to interrelate and link the new information with the one we already knew.
The final issue that remains unsolved is whether the change in relationship between the skilled writer and the trained reader will be a positive thing or not. The canonical “domination of the author” is dethroned when the relationship becomes more interactive, and the reader can add thoughts to the original text. As Birkerts states, we will not be reading anymore, but “texting” or “word-piloting”.
In conclusion, we could say that all the author ideas are well reasoned and based, but we could argue that it all depends on the extent of things, and on the level to which we bring things. There are types of text that are meant to be read in an unidirectional way, like, for instance a famous novel, and texts that are put on the web to provoke thought and discussions. It will depend on what we are looking for and on what we have in front of us.