Getting his digs in early.

Birkerts is a very public critic of what's called "electronic writing", and there's no reason to expect that he's about to change his mind on the subject. Still, there's something a bit overdone in opening his admittedly fascinating and even convincing review of what seems to him the strange success of complexity in fiction writing (particularly sentence construction) by first blaming the electronic media for making such a success seem an anomaly:

The communications revolution—everything from e-mail to the ubiquitous cell phone—has spawned what seems to many an impoverished, phrase-based paradigm. The sound byte, the instant message—with every year, increments of meaning and expression seem to shrink.

I have no intention of comparing my writing to that of today's pioneering writers of fiction. Such a comparison would only accentuate my limitations. I do, however, think it's fair to stretch Birkerts a bit and suggest that hypertextual writing, instead of being an aberration, a blight on the pristine landscape of true writing, is a legitimate expression of the complexity about which Birkerts writes.

Go to: My greatest fear.