Changing the Subject

What happens to our inner lives when every moment demands a response, a click, or a swipe? In Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age, Sven Birkerts tackles this urgent question with reflection, lyricism, and unease. A sequel in spirit to his 1994 classic The Gutenberg Elegies, this book returns to the territory of reading, imagination, and the self—asking what becomes of all three when our attention lives on borrowed time.

Birkerts contends that the digital revolution has not only altered how we gather information but reshaped what it means to be human. He sees our devices as extensions of a larger paradigm shift—from inwardness and solitude toward dispersion, connectivity, and a new kind of collective self. In this transformation, the role of art and literature stands as both casualty and remedy: they are threatened by diminished attention but remain our most powerful tools for reclaiming it.

The Age of Too Much Information

Birkerts opens with a haunting image from his own memory: the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear incident. He recalls the panic of hearing invisible dangers move through the atmosphere—a sense of being threatened by something unseen but omnipresent. Decades later, that fear returned in an unexpected form: a new kind of radioactive force—data. When his teenage daughter exclaimed “TMI!” (too much information), Birkerts recognized the dark poetry of the acronym. The invisible flood of information shaping our reality today feels equally systemic and pervasive. We live, he argues, inside an all-encompassing informational ecosystem that subtly remakes our consciousness, often without our noticing.

To illustrate this shift, he contrasts two archetypal figures—Adam, a man from 18th-century Boston, and Zeno, his 21st-century counterpart. Adam’s world is defined by locality and sensory contact; Zeno’s by abstraction and mediated connection. Both stand on the same beach, looking at a figure approaching from afar—but the experience of watching, Birkerts claims, is fundamentally different. Adam’s perception is grounded, while Zeno’s is dispersed across networks, screens, and systems of information. What was once direct and embodied has become mediated and detached. The very texture of our attention has changed.

The Collapse of Context and the Rising Digital Hive

Information without context becomes noise, Birkerts warns, and the systems built to give us order—Google, Wikipedia, the cloud—paradoxically deepen our dependency. Citing Kevin Kelly’s vision of a “universal library,” where every text is linked and cross-referenced in a single global brain, Birkerts sees a new form of collectivized intelligence emerging. On the surface, this seems utopian: a shared human consciousness. But Birkerts views it with suspicion. When information becomes universally aggregated, individuality—the very condition that produced art, invention, and dissent—faces extinction. He calls this drift toward connected sameness “the hive life.”

Our digital age, he argues, has moved from a world of books—discrete objects produced by individuals—to one of glowing terminals modeling the logic of systems. The result is a weakening of presence. The person who once stood as author, reader, or artist now dissolves into a participant in vast mechanical circuits. Birkerts aligns with critics like Nicholas Carr (The Shallows) and Jaron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget) in suggesting that neural plasticity and digital immersion are reshaping our brains, favoring speed and distraction over concentration and reflection. The cost is what he calls the “specific gravity” of things—the weighted sense of their significance.

Art, Imagination, and the Power of Attention

Yet Changing the Subject is not only a lament; it’s a defense of imagination as the self’s last frontier. For Birkerts, art is not just cultural ornament but a “feat of concentration”—an act that generates attention rather than consuming it. Reading Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, he rediscovers the galvanizing force of a book that demands full mental and emotional presence. “Works of art are feats of concentration,” he writes, “and imagination is the instrument of concentration.” When we engage deeply—with a poem, a novel, a photograph—we reconnect with the self that digital life erodes.

His essays move from analyses of technology (GPS, iPads, AI assistants like Siri) to meditations on reading, photography, and attention. Each returns to the same conviction: artistic experience is both an antidote and an inoculation against the weightlessness of our time. “Art,” he insists, “demands and creates attention.” And through attention, we retrieve our individuality, our capacity for wonder, and a reconnection with what he calls “the soul”—a term often absent from contemporary discourse, but essential to his vision.

Why This Matters Now

In a culture that celebrates multitasking and algorithmic efficiency, Birkerts reminds us that attention is the moral act of our age. The book’s subtitle, “Art and Attention in the Internet Age,” is no metaphor: he means it literally. Attention directs consciousness, determines values, and defines identity. To change attention is to change the subject—to alter not just what we focus on, but who we are. Through a blend of memoir, criticism, and cultural reflection, he shows that how we attend to the world—through reading, art, or simple noticing—shapes our freedom, our empathy, and our humanity itself.

Birkerts opens his inquiry with the metaphor of the invisible meltdown. The catastrophe at Three Mile Island made him feel, for the first time, trapped inside an uncontrollable system—one governed by unseen forces. Decades later, he recognizes this feeling again in the modern informational field. Like radiation, data surrounds us, permeating every act of life, and subtly reforming the structure of consciousness. What we experience as a convenience—search engines, instant communication, omnipresent news—he sees as an ambient fog that obscures depth and meaning.

In a conversation with his children, he realizes that “TMI” (“too much information”) has transformed from a quip into a condition. We live amid “the context of no context,” echoing media theorist George W. S. Trow’s warning from 1980. Data overwhelms us but seldom offers coherence. We adapt, Birkerts argues, by skimming, multitasking, and diversifying our awareness until focus itself becomes intolerable. The self—once defined by continuity and reflection—now survives in fragments, dispersed across tabs and feeds.

Adam, Zeno, and the Evolution of Consciousness

To make this contrast vivid, Birkerts conjures two characters. Adam, an 18th-century American, lives in bounded space. He knows his small town intimately; his knowledge of the wider world is partial and indirect. Zeno, a man of the new millennium, lives inside streams of mediated data. His life depends on screens, signals, and instantaneous communication. Though they might stand in the same physical location, Birkerts insists, their experience of reality differs completely: Adam inhabits; Zeno links. Adam’s consciousness concentrates energy; Zeno’s disperses it.

This transformation, Birkerts argues, has consequences beyond convenience. As our engagement with the physical world diminishes, our emotional depth and sense of presence fade too. “The air surrounding them,” he writes of Zeno’s imagined landscape, “is no longer the same.” The world feels lighter but also less alive—a condition mirrored in Milan Kundera’s phrase “the unbearable lightness of being.”

Systemic Control and Psychological Abdication

The rise of algorithmic systems—from Google to GPS—marks, for Birkerts, a new kind of surrender. In Kevin Kelly’s techno-utopian essay “Scan This Book!” he sees the dream of total integration: every word cross-linked to every other, consciousness itself turned into a searchable library. But in this universal brain, the individual mind becomes redundant. What once demanded imagination—connecting, comparing, interpreting—is now automated. The distinction between data and meaning collapses; “collective intelligence” replaces introspection.

By letting machines “gather and prioritize our materials,” we abdicate a crucial human capacity: the struggle to interpret and make sense. The self, he concludes, has become porous, “lighter…more distracted,” moving through life without full connection to the present. We turn to technology for relief from the very anxiety it produces. Each innovation promises focus or freedom but adds another layer between us and the world. As he puts it, “We trade one set of aptitudes for another,” losing repose and immersion in exchange for access and speed. The self thus becomes what the system needs it to be—responsive, efficient, and endlessly divided.

In one essay, Birkerts describes reading a piece titled “Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert,” which celebrates the rise of collaborative knowledge. The author, Maria Bustillos, portrays figures like Marshall McLuhan and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales as prophets of a new era of “communal knowledge-making.” She quotes media theorist Bob Stein’s assertion that “the sadness of our age is characterized by the shackles of individualism.” For Birkerts, this line crystallizes the cultural shift he has felt but struggled to name: the reversal of the Enlightenment ideal of the self-reliant individual.

The ideal of authorship—that knowledge arises from the labor and vision of distinct minds—is replaced by crowdsourcing. Expertise dissolves into consensus. What Bustillos calls “the death of the expert” strikes Birkerts as a deeper mourning: the death of the self. He draws on Jaron Lanier’s critique of the “hive mind,” warning that the rhetoric of collaboration hides an erasure of identity and accountability.

The Room That Is the Elephant

Where others see freedom and egalitarianism, Birkerts sees peril. “What if the elephant in the room is the room itself?” he asks. The environment of digital living—networked, surveilled, and collective—has become invisible precisely because it is total. Like oxygen, it shapes every action but goes unnoticed. The loss of felt privacy, he warns, changes the texture of consciousness itself. To be constantly reachable—24/7—is to live without mystery, without aura, as Walter Benjamin defined it. Always accessible, we become transparent beings who can no longer inhabit distance or silence.

From Books to Clouds

The symbol of this transformation is the “cloud.” Once a metaphor of transcendence, it now names a system that stores our data and dissolves our artifacts. What Marx said of capitalism—“all that is solid melts into air”—applies here literally. Records, CDs, and books vanish into invisible servers; culture becomes weightless. The disappearance of physical media erases not just ownership but presence. “The world,” he writes, “its nouns, seems to have receded a bit.” In its place, a new totality: a universe where identity is defined by access, and attention becomes the last form of resistance.

Birkerts is not a Luddite, but he inhabits the space of resistance. His essay “It’s not because I’m a cranky Luddite, I swear” starts with a confession: he has never owned a cell phone. This abstention, though trivial, makes him an anomaly in a culture where connectivity equals existence. He experiences firsthand the social tension that comes from defying digital norms—friends accuse him of arrogance; family members express irritation. Beneath these reactions, he suspects, lies collective unease: a subliminal awareness that our devices have quietly altered what it means to be human.

Reachability and the Death of Distance

For Birkerts, the smartphone fundamentally changes geography. To be “reachable” at all times is to collapse the meaning of distance. The critic Walter Benjamin called aura “the unique phenomenon of a distance”; constant connectivity annihilates that aura. When we erase the friction that once defined boundaries—between places, between moments of solitude and contact—we participate in what he calls “the 24-7 condition,” a world without pauses or thresholds. He refuses a phone not out of nostalgia but out of desire to preserve mystery, the right to be unreachable.

The Psychology of Technological Obedience

Birkerts recounts his first encounter with Siri, the voice of a GPS assistant. Driving at night, he finds himself both awed and unsettled by the smooth authority of the machine. He realizes with embarrassment that he instinctively seeks Siri’s approval, craving acknowledgment from an algorithm. This moment mirrors a broader truth: our technologies do not simply serve us—they shape our psychology, conditioning us toward dependence and compliance. When he learns, the next day, that Siri is already obsolete (“Does anyone still use Siri?”), he feels old before his time, trapped in a cycle of perpetual innovation that breeds both fascination and fatigue. “To live in a technocracy,” he writes, “is to live with a perpetual sense of being in arrears.”

The Logic of Acquiescence

Birkerts cites tech executives who liken the adoption of new applications to a “love affair.” First there is hesitation, then seduction, then devotion. The rhetoric—“We’re just building the dream”—betrays an assumption of inevitability. For Birkerts, this is the most chilling phrase of all, echoing the compliance of those who believe that resistance is futile. Each app adds a layer of mediation under the guise of empowerment. The price, he insists, is our interior life. “The nature of change,” he warns, “is that it should not appear to be change.”

If technology disperses us, art gathers us back. In one pivotal essay, Birkerts describes reading Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus and feeling transported—not just entertained, but transformed by attention itself. “Works of art are feats of concentration,” he realizes, “and imagination is the instrument of concentration.” His insight reframes art as a moral force: a counterweight to distraction, a means of restoring integrity to the self. To read seriously—to give oneself wholly to form and language—is an act of reinhabiting the world.

Imagination vs. Information

Birkerts defines imagination and information as opposing energies. Imagination shapes from within; information imposes from without. The health of culture, he argues, depends on their equilibrium. But today, information’s outward pressure overwhelms imagination’s inward energy. As a result, contemporary art often reflects dispersion rather than synthesis. He laments that “ours is a period strangely without show of artistic force.” The question he poses—“Can we still make art that changes the world?”—is not rhetorical but existential. The sources of imagination, he fears, may be depleted by constant mediation.

Art as Inoculation

Despite his doubts, Birkerts finds hope in the practice of deep artistic engagement. A genuine work of art, he writes, doesn’t just offer experience—it renews our capacity for experience. It “arms us, if only for a time, against the depletion that threatens on every front.” He likens this to inoculation: art exposes us to the concentrated virus of reality so that we can survive its diluted epidemic forms. Reading, in this view, is a spiritual exercise. It restores what therapy and distraction can only imitate—the feeling of being fully alive to one’s consciousness.

In one of his most profound essays, “It Wants to Find You,” Birkerts discovers in the writings of Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil a moral vocabulary for attention. Murdoch’s phrase “loving attention” and Weil’s assertion that “absolute attention is prayer” converge in his mind. What if attention itself, he wonders, is a moral act—a disciplined openness to existence? Attention, in this sense, is not passive focus but an ethical stance toward the world: a refusal to let reality be reduced to convenience.

When he rereads Siegfried Lenz’s The German Lesson, he feels the convergence between moral attention and aesthetic creation. The novel’s patience, its devotion to character and setting, models an order of awareness that modern life has almost extinguished. Reading becomes a re-education of the senses. “It was restorative,” Birkerts writes, “I found I was available again to kinds of reverie and reflection not always on tap.” For him, art’s power lies in its ability to cultivate this availability—to make us receptive to the unfiltered real.

“Imagination is a kind of attention,” Birkerts concludes, “and attention is a kind of prayer.” In practicing one, we awaken the other.

Throughout Changing the Subject, Birkerts returns to reading—not as hobby but as existential model. In “Notebook: Reading in a Digital Age” and “Bolaño Summer,” he reflects on what happens when we immerse ourselves in a novel. To read deeply is to enter “a third state,” suspended between inner world and outer world. The act is temporal as much as mental: it trains us to dwell in duration, to linger. Against the “lateral” speed of the Internet, the novel offers “vertical time,” a descent into depth.

Drawing on neuroscience (he cites Nicholas Carr and studies of neuroplasticity), Birkerts observes that digital reading rewires the brain for fragmentation. In contrast, literary reading trains reflection and coherence. Quoting Ortega y Gasset—“Culture is what remains after we’ve forgotten everything we’ve read”—he argues that reading shapes us not through memorized information but through the residue of form. The experience of reading enriches consciousness even when content fades. This, he claims, is the soul’s form of memory.

Attention as Duration

In modern culture, he writes, concentration must be fought for. Serious reading “strikes a blow against the dissipation of self.” When he reads Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, he finds that its world moves into him and shapes his perception: “The consciousness of the book affects everything I see.” Such infestation is not escapism but awareness intensified. Reading becomes, for Birkerts, a way of recovering agency amid the neural clamor of modern life.

In “Emerson’s ‘The Poet’—A Circling,” Birkerts reaches the spiritual center of his project. Revisiting Emerson’s essay, he reclaims the unfashionable word soul. The soul, he insists, is not a religious artifact but “the part of the self that is not shaped by contingencies.” Poetry, at its highest, is the language of that self. Emerson’s belief that poets “render the conversation we have had with nature” reveals, for Birkerts, a lost ideal: that language can still mediate between matter and meaning, the world and its reflection within us.

The Crisis of Art in a Material Age

Our sciences, Birkerts argues, deal with the external; they chart the measurable and neglect the inner. Art once bridged this divide by transforming material perception into spiritual insight. Today that bridge has collapsed. The arts, he laments, have lost much of their public gravity. They survive as niches rather than necessities. Yet he holds out hope for a “new confession,” a language that could once again gather the fragmented energies of our time into form. This, he suggests, is the poet’s enduring task: to model attention profound enough to awaken the sleeping soul of the age.

Birkerts ends the book with the death of Seamus Heaney, a poet he knew personally and revered as a figure of continuity between eras. Heaney, he writes, embodied an “unmediated, unfragmented” presence—a man rooted in the physical and spiritual textures of the world. His death feels to Birkerts like the end of an age of attention. “We mourn not just the loss of the poet,” he writes, “but of what he had in his keeping.”

The essay juxtaposes his grief with a domestic scene: a household power outage that severs Internet, phone, and television for five days. At first there is frustration; then a quiet revelation. Deprived of connection, he rediscovers self-containment: “I was just a man in a room.” The stillness echoes Heaney’s capacity to dwell within the real. The outage becomes metaphor: an enforced descent into the interior world art invites us to inhabit voluntarily. As systems return to life, he wonders whether exile from the network might be the only way to reencounter being. The poet’s final words to his wife—a text in Latin, “noli timere” (“be not afraid”)—become his benediction to the reader: Courage will be needed to live attentively in an age of distraction.