Thursday evening I attended the lecture by Sven Birkerts where he analyzed Kertesz’s exhibit “On Reading”. He discussed how Kertesz’s photographs impacted him; how a photograph has the power to provoke thought. He pointed out a few of the pictures in the exhibit that meant something to him and discussed what he thought of when he saw them and the possible message that Kertesz was trying to convey. He said that know one knows what the people in the photographs were feeling when they were reading but that a person could imagine the feelings that the subject was having based on their own experiences.
He then discussed the idea of the E-Book, and how in recent years it has become more popular and how it will affect the sacredness of reading. When talking about the E-book he stressed that although the text might be the same, the experience you have while reading is not. His most interesting argument is that when we read an E-book we are losing the physical object that shows others what we are interested in. Which takes away our ability to start a conversation with another person if you can see that they have read the same books as you. I agree with Birkerts’ argument that E-books have taken away the sacredness that we associate with a hard cover book.
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I'm glad that you went to the talk on Thursday night, it sounded like a worth while experience for us as CMC majors. It's true that only the individual reading gets that feeling when reading, and even then we all read and decode text in different ways, for example remember what Barthes talks about when he discusses the pleasure from the text and how there is an equal distance between the author and the reader (though I think that last one was by Macherey, you may want to check). You show a good understanding of what he discusses but it would have been great to see what you thought about what he had to say in relations to everything we have covered this semester. Why do you think that the physical book is very different to read than an electronic version of it? It would be more economical to have one device carrying all of our books on it, and would save the trees. Which theorist would argue about the authenticity vs the originality of reading physical books than online ones? :)
Also this is below the word minimum :)
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