The Late Age of Print by Ted Striphas Review

We've just published my review of The Late Age of Print by Ted Striphas at The Quarterly Conversation.

It's an interesting book, one that I greatly enjoyed; one reason is because Striphas ably reinvigorates the handwriting vs typing vs computing debate:

Thus, while discussing the leap from printed to electronic reading,
Striphas trots out Sven Birkerts—the closest thing we have to a go-to
curmudgeon for print cheerleaders—in an oft-cited essay from his
collection The Gutenberg Elegies:

"Nearly weightless though it is, the word printed on a
page is a thing. The configuration of impulses on a screen is not—it is
a manifestation, an indeterminate entity both particle and wave. . . .
The former occupies a position in space. . . . The latter, once
dematerialized, digitized back into storage, into memory, cannot be
said to exist in quite the same way."

Striphas’s reply is sterling: he notes Birkert’s pleasure that he composed Gutenberg
on an IBM Selectric typewriter (the gleefully anachronistic Birkerts
happily raising his editor’s ire in the process), notes that Birkerts
“sees his decision as an act of defiance,” and then dives right down
into the meat of his argument:

"Yet it is precisely here—in the confidence Birkerts
feels in slowly, methodically, t-y-p-i-n-g o-u-t w-o-r-d-s on his IBM
Selectric—that his claims about presence, social power, and media begin
to get all jammed up. . . . Only a profound act of forgetting could
sustain Birkerts’s claims about the transparency of typewriting. His
typewriter, after all, is not only mechanical but electrical (hence, Selectric), and as such it’s a technology engaged in an abstract process of rendering"

You can read the whole thing here.

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