On Frets about the Death of the Book Al Filreis University of Pennsylvania Go to Filreis home page. Some anxieties become merely historical. One is surely Barry Sanders's. I'm more concerned, actually, with the way in which the logic of Sanders and Birkerts and others affects our thinking about universities at a critical moment when teaching, the intellectual relation of teacher to student, and basic university structures, can dramatically change for the better if we take a few conceptual cues from the information age. For Barry Sanders, computers are intellectually fascistic.
Authority resides in the book as well.
But it is authority, not technological ukase. This so completely mistakes electronic text that one hardly knows where to begin. Sanders is wrong about the relationship between the authority of the programmer and the individual reader of e-text. An argument that proposes the preservation of freedom is often really an argument for a certain inflexible way of teaching. Finally, Sanders is nostalgic for a stable teaching authority.