Sven Birkets

Has the Owl Really Flown?

    I grew up in what I guess you would call a normal house hold. Both my parents worked, I had an older brother and a younger sister. I personally don’t know why anyone sane would plan for a family with more children then there are parents. Both my siblings and I played at least two sports year round. It was always a toss up which parent was going to be taking me to my game that night, but it didn’t matter by the end of the game my other parent was usually there. I didn’t even mind when they didn’t catch the end of my game, this meant I was able to play on the playground while we waited for the other to arrive. One time I remember my Dad and I waited for an hour for my mom to show up. She had accidently gone to the wrong elementary school on the other side of town. My Dad taught me how to slap hit that night, now looking back must have been a difficult task to teach a seven year old how to bat from the opposite side they usually bat from. One hour seemed to just fly by that night, now I couldn’t imagine waiting twenty minutes for someone to meet up with me. What happened over these twenty years to make waiting on someone such a difficult task?

Sven Birkert’s brings up many good points about the way our society is shifting in an age of information. In addition to the societal shift, people are changing how they retain this information.  Birkert’s opinions are very clear that if we don’t start reading vertically, as he would say, we are in danger of not experiencing a true aesthetic experience. “We are experiencing in our times a loss of depth – a loss, that is, of the very paradigm of depth. A sense of the deep and natural connectedness of things is a function of vertical consciousness. It’s apotheosis is what was once called wisdom” (36). Does technology make our lives easier, or is life harder now because we have to keep up with the advancements of technology?

    There are many different kinds of data bases and different ways to...