Architect Gunnar Birkerts, Sven's father, designed the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, NY.

Mule Variations has a new interview with Sven Birkerts and it touches on the author’s prophetic 1994 work, The Gutenberg Elegies, which examined the fate of reading in the age of Internet. An excerpt:

“Mule Variations: In 1994, in the days before widespread use of the Internet or cell phones, you wrote inThe Gutenberg Elegies, ‘We will all spend more and more of our time in cyberspace producing, sending, receiving, and responding, and necessarily less time interacting in a ‘hands on’ way with the old material order.  Similarly, we will establish a wide lateral interaction, dealing via screen with more and more people at the same time our face-to-face encounters diminish.  It will be harder and harder – we know this already – to step free of our mediating devices.’  At the time, this observation was far from readily apparent to the public at large.  Now that it has played out as you predicted, do you ever feel like The Gutenberg Elegies was too far ahead of its time?  That if you had published it, say, five years later in 1999 more people would have understood what you were talking about?

Sven Birkerts: I think it came out at a time when the people who tend to think about these things were thinking about them, even though it hadn’t entered the wider public consciousness.  I think it was a wonderfully opportune time to start the debate.  And it was very coincidental, the publication of that book, because it came out at the very same time as Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, who runs the MIT media labs.  And his was this raving, ‘Here’s the new world!  All solutions are in hand!  We’re all digital!’  And so the books were reviewed over and over and over again together.  And he and I did a couple things where we’d go on talk shows together.  To me, it said we’d come to a moment where it could be talked about.  What’s interesting to me now is that the wave’s falling back a little.  Some of the people were so gung ho about it, for instance Jaron Lanier who published a book this year.  Here’s this wild-haired Silicon Valley computer visionary suddenly starting to find the problems with the current situation.  He’s coming back from his raving enthusiasm.  He saw where the digits were going, but he didn’t see what would happen when the digits got tied up with the economy, etc.”