I recently read Sven Birkerts' book The Gutenberg Elegies (partially online here), and this post stems from a recent dialogue with friend and colleague Dale Hunscher:

"The figure-ground model, which has always featured a solitary self before a background that is the society of other selves.... is ever less tenable in the world as it is becoming. There are no more wildernesses, no more lonely homesteads, and, outside of cinema, no more emblems of the exalted individual."

Basically, he posits and laments the decline of reading as a result of the information age. Using examples like the fact that the word-processor has destroyed the relationship between the author and the permanence of physical inscription (i.e. writing), Sven suggests that authors think less about what they put down when they have the capacity to rewrite/edit at will. Did pencil and paper writers think less about their work than ancient scribes with papyrus? or cuneiform? The nice thing is that most of Sven's analytical points are dead on. What is inappropriate however is the value-judgment that he places on change. Instead of saying "Change happens and in brings both good and bad," Sven feels the inner urge to place a valued judgment on change as "bad" (or at least on these changes). What he fails to acknowledge is that people who grow up in the new era may have a different relationship to inscription, but that it is not necessarily a worse one. The quote above sums up and reveals the whole Sven's ontology. He is caught up an imagined Thoreau-ian ideal of the individual (not to mention Rousseau and the orangutan), so of course, he laments the loss of the imagined earlier state of being (the loss of the individuated self to the rise of the holistic social is a reverse application of Lacan.) If Sven is taken at face value, we never should have left the cuneiform era and the serious permanence of inscription we had then. But why stop there? Why not just agree with Socrates (and others) that we never should have left oral culture for writing at all?