reviews
584 College & Research Libraries November 1997
ist and your politics become Libertar-
ian. If the Center for Democracy and
Technology’s Web site starts sporting
Microsoft’s banner ads, sells its demo-
graphics to direct marketers, and links
to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, I sup-
pose I will have to concede that Sobchak
is right—but do not count on it.
There are other essays in the book,
but what I have described thus far
serves to illustrate both the strengths
and the weaknesses of the cultural stud-
ies approach that informs much of the
volume. The method boils down to pos-
iting some type of horrifyingly unjust,
underlying structure that you think
tends to manifest in all the various prod-
ucts of Western culture, and then to
select some things you have heard
about the Internet that seem to echo
this pattern. As a method, this pattern-
matching, Marx-alluding technique pro-
vides the touchstone for interesting,
thought-provoking, and often madden-
ing creative writing projects. The results
can be amusing, too, thanks in part to
the unintentionally hilarious overstate-
ments (e.g., “Prepare for holographic
Slashers to break out of ’alt.sex.stories’
and stalk the earth”). At the end of the
day, though, you really do not know any-
thing more about the Internet’s hidden
assumptions, or how the network is
likely to shape society in the years to
come.—Bryan Pfaffenberger, University of
Virginia.
Tolstoy’s Dictaphone: Technology and the
Muse. Ed. Sven Birkerts. St. Paul, Minn.:
Graywolf (Graywolf Forum, 1), 1996.
261p. $16 (ISBN 1-55597-248-9). LC 96-
75790.
Many librarians, as they watch the
gradual migration of their collections
from print to electronic form, experience
some unease over a question few actu-
ally verbalize: What influence does the
medium through which our culture
passes have on the ability and willing-
ness of readers to engage in dialog with
result will be sabotage and terrorism,
coupled with the loss of civil liberties as
governments crack down. I frankly do
not see how the chaotic and varied as-
semblage of fact, opinion, marketing
hype, and loonyism that currently con-
stitutes the “knowledge” available on the
Internet could possibly confer “ever
more intoxicating powers.” Admittedly,
the ability to access Internet “knowl-
edge” (or more to the point, to differen-
tiate between online trash and treasure)
may make some slight contribution to
career success in the years to come, but
the strategic value of Internet access
surely pales before the real determi-
nants of class differentiation in Western
society (class, race, and differential ac-
cess to high-quality education).
Turning to the “democratic possibili-
ties” of electronic media technologies,
Sobchak (“Democratic Franchise and
the Electronic Frontier”) begins by not-
ing, in the term franchise, the conflation
of the right to political participation and
the exclusive rights of commercial en-
terprises to sell products in a certain
area. For most of us, the term’s two
meanings might seem accidental, an
artifact of intersecting word histories,
but for Sobchak, they testify to an un-
derlying cultural conflation of political
liberalism and capitalism that pops up
in anything American do. This conflation
signals a contradiction between politi-
cal freedom and monopoly capitalist
domination, Sobchak says, which lies at
the heart of American culture. But, of
course, this is not recognized: It is mys-
tified by its reappearance at the super-
structural level in the notion of free-
market competition. The Internet re-
peats this pattern, she says, by offering
what appears to be enhanced political
participation blended with a healthy
free market, but this masks the areas
of contestation between political free-
dom and capitalist domination, and to
the extent that you buy into this, you
become a numb, apathetic consumer-
Book Reviews 585
writers? In a way, this is an old ques-
tion: Choices between alternative “data
formats” are at least as old as micro-
film, and indeed can be fairly said to
date back to the invention of writing as
an alternative to the culture of oral nar-
rative. With the advent and rapid
spread of our modern digital text-and-
image culture, however, the question
appears to face us now with a special
vengeance. Is our cultural heritage be-
ing totally reformatted, and if so, with
what consequences for the nature, con-
tent, and integrity of cultural transmis-
sion?
Reviewer and critic Sven Birkerts
addressed the effects of technological
change on readers in his much-dis-
cussed 1994 book The Gutenberg Elegies:
The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.
He based his reflections on the obser-
vation, surely correct, that “how we re-
ceive information bears vitally on the
ways we experience and interpret real-
ity.” In this earlier book, Birkerts dwelled
on the joys of reading but wrote with
special ardor and eloquence of the glo-
rious tactility and meaningfulness of the
printed book as a vessel of knowledge
and vicarious experience. Yet, as the title
suggests, with its allusions to wakes and
funerals, Gutenberg is a deeply pessi-
mistic, even gloomy, work. Birkerts finds
that “the whole familiar tradition of the
book” is “destined for imminent histori-
cal oblivion,” more broadly seeing him-
self and a dwindling number of his
thoughtful contemporaries being
“gradually coerced into living against
[their] natural grain, forced to adapt to
a pace and a level of technological com-
plexity” that is now driving them to re-
volt, though without any hope of suc-
c e s s .
Now Birkerts presents this new an-
thology of twenty essays, some written
especially for the volume, others previ-
ously published in literary magazines.
Although from a host of differing and
often conflicting perspectives, the es-
says in Tolstoy’s Dictaphone have in com-
mon that they address the other, the
“writing” half of the cultural transmis-
sion dyad. The title, of course, is just as
loaded as that of Birkerts’s earlier work
and reflects his own unbroken agenda.
It alludes to Leo Tolstoy’s alleged re-
fusal to use a new invention called the
dictaphone, which Tolstoy explained by
saying it would surely be “too dread-
fully exciting” and distract him from the
content of his literary compositions. In
his letter to prospective contributors to
his anthology (quoted in his introduc-
tion), Birkerts makes no bones about his
own views on the topic at hand (“What
will be the place of self, of soul—of art-
ist, writer, individual—in the society we
are so hell-bent on creating?”). Yet, de-
lightfully, the responses of these free-
spirited contributors cover the entire
gamut of reaction to the new technolo-
gies, from the arrogant technophobia
of novelist Paul West and the blanket
rejection of all “simulacra” by environ-
mentalist writer Mark Slouka on the one
hand, to the ruminations of hypertext
fiction writer Carolyn Guyer and the
eager embrace of technology by femi-
nist multiculturalist Carole Maso, for
whom electronic writing is very wel-
come in that it opens up a “deeper
undertanding of the instability of texts,
of worlds.” (Maso states further: “Elec-
tronic writing will help us to think about
impermanence, facility, fragility and
freedom, spatial intensities, irrever-
ences, experimentation, new worlds,
clean slates.”)
Between these extremes are a num-
ber of writers who, like most of the rest of
us, are struggling to maintain good
writer’s discipline despite the siren en-
ticements of “AutoText” and
“StyleCheck” and to preserve what is
important and valuable in preelectronic
writing technologies, while at the same
time showing a guarded openness for the
potential of the new, almost infinite but,
above all, instant mutability of text. These
586 College & Research Libraries November 1997
essays also deal with technology most
broadly. At the low-tech end of the scale,
novelist and essayist Lynne Sharon
Schwartz, herself the author of a very
Birkertsian book on why we read and how
what we read shapes us (Ruined by Read-
ing, 1996), considers the anthropological
aspects of telephone communication.
Magazine editor Wendy Lesser praises
how e-mail, “once it has been brought
under control and made to function in the
life you have already constructed for your-
self,” can “reintroduce us to the form of
writing that best enables us to know and
acknowledge friendship.”
Three essays in this volume stand
out as especially illuminating and per-
suasive. They are, first, the article by
the anthologist himself, entitled “’The
Fate of the Book’” (note the double set
of quotation marks, playing on the al-
ready vast body of literature on this
topic), in which he offers a crystal-clear
summation of his extensive reflections
on the functional, perceptual, and
semiological differences between books
and screen technologies, going beyond
those contained in Gutenberg and break-
ing somewhat with his earlier either/or
dichotomy. “These are not two ap-
proaches to the same thing,” Birkerts
now writes, “but two different things.
Books cannot and should not have to
compete with chip-powered imple-
ments.” A second intriguing contribu-
tion to this volume is that of national
poet laureate Robert Pinsky, translator
into English of Dante’s Inferno (1994) but
also author of Mindwheel, an early inter-
active computer game, and thus a writer
standing confidently astride both cul-
tures. Pinsky considers the worldview
of the brilliant, but culturally myopic,
postwar inventors of computer technol-
ogy who have brought all of this
progress down upon us and in the pro-
cess imposed a part of that worldview
upon their less technically inclined con-
temporaries. Finally, and most poeti-
cally, I enjoyed the essay “Screens: An
Alchemical Scrapbook,” by University
of Michigan English professor Alice
Fulton. Fulton contemplates the aes-
thetics of the computer screen, poeti-
cizing the encounter between human
and machine much as Birkerts has done
with the encounter between reader and
book, in the end emerging with a syn-
thesis of her affections for screen and
book cultures that serves to temper
some of the shrillness of other articles
in this collection.
Birkerts’s new anthology probably will
be of less native interest to librarians
than Gutenberg, for it is the mediation of
the process of reading, not writing, in
which we as a profession are most di-
rectly involved. Yet, for the light these
diverse essays cast on culture creation
in the digital age, Tolstoy’s Dictaphone
offers a fascinating complement to
Birkerts’s previous book. Those inter-
ested in a more scientific (i.e., less hu-
manistically oriented) study of the dia-
lectics of writing and text technology
may wish to turn to another recent col-
lection of essays: The New Writing Envi-
ronment: Writers at Work in a World of Tech-
nology (1996).—Jeffrey Garrett, Northwest-
ern University.
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