In "Reading in a Digital Age" in the Scholar's Spring issue, Sven Birkerts writes about his students taking notes on laptops during lectures, saying he wouldn't be surprised to learn that they are trolling the Internet while listening. Then last week we learned from The Washington Post that a professor at Georgetown Law has banished laptops from his lectures to minimize potential diversions. With that in mind, we asked Birkerts what aspects of technology he can endorse, or at least live with.

"Too late, I think, to regard technologies as something one is for or against (except for purposes of abstract argument)," he replied. "For me it comes down to degrees of use, or acquiescence, and having an awareness of what is changed, compromised, or put at risk in exchange for what benefits." He is most suspicious of technologies that alter our fundamental sense of the basic time/space categories, he said, either by making things that need to be known through effort or resistance too easy or, as with GPS, giving the illusion that we never don't know where we are. "The opposite is metaphysically truer," he said, because "we never have a clue.

"Also, technologies that abridge social chasms too readily create communities without effort or stress--these are to be watched carefully. Again, it's all a matter of degrees, and if we are not ready to dig in our heels every so often, we ought to at least have an active awareness of how we are being changed, and what we are being changed from."