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Back to top: Sven Birkerts 1994
The technological transformation
| Intro to 1994 edition | an epochal and very quick transformation |
Over the past few decades, in the blink of the eye of history, our culture has begun to go through what promises to be a total metamorphosis. The influx of electronic communications and information processing technologies, abetted by the steady improvement of the microprocessor, has rapidly brought on a condition of critical mass. Suddenly it feels like everything is poised for change; the slower world that many of us grew up with dwindles in the rearview mirror. The stable hierarchies of the printed page – one of the defining norms of that world – are being superseded by the rush of impulses through freshly minted circuits. |
| a "riot of societal forces" | The displacement of the page by the screen is not yet total (as evidenced by the book you are holding) – it may never be total – but the large-scale tendency in that direction has to be obvious to anyone who looks. [...] changes in the immediate sphere of print refer outward to the totality; they map on a smaller scale the riot of societal forces. |
Back to top: Sven Birkerts 1994
Humanistic retrenchment
| p. 3 | an [TEXT TO BE COMPLETED - ZI823 mDP] | Over [QUOTATION TO BE COMPLETED - ZI823 mDP] |
Back to top: Sven Birkerts 1994