Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age [1995], New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

« Receiving and transmitting – the potency of digital information lies in its compression and flow, its supple malleability. We are, with that ever-amazing hi-tech effortlessness, threading ourselves to others in the great universe of signals. In terms of psychological implications, this is probably the core development. The speed and amniotic feel of the process are phenomenal, their impact yet to be assessed. Messages, data packets, images, and sound flash from person to person, all exertion of transmission obviated. Already, in the early years of the new millennium, the volume of exchange defies computation – and we are just in the early stages. If information were visible – color-coded, let's say – then the incoming alien observer would see not blue ocean but a glowing aurora borealis-like shimmer, an omnidirectional pulsing of colored light. Our new world. »