Given this map of the psyche of WP, Heim is now ready to calculate the fallout. Where electric writing offers speed and productivity, there is nonetheless an undeniable sense of the loss of some ineffable intimacy with language. The immediate rush felt by plugging into networks must be balanced, in psychic terms, against the more private need to express personal feelings after a period of reflection. Using Heidegger's critique of the Enframing effect of technological advance, Heim tries to show how we can count the psychic cost of our brave new words. Screenfreaks' Gym Life at the Interface, then, needs continual healthcare.
Electric speed kills.
Being a writer, he also produces instances of that very life, and as a digital writer, moreover, he produces them faster than Heidegger. Much of this book, then, reads like a sophisticated reflection on his personal experience of hacking away there at the Interface. Heim is concerned with how folk like himself, who turn out ideas, buzz on digital methods. Perhaps when the majority of citizens handle text in databases via a monitor, it will be feasible to talk in general about the new Enframing. Until then, Heim's book will offer us the special pleasure of the play of electric ideas packaged in the very epitome of the classic model of the mind, with its symphonic template of three movements there to counter-point the fatal attraction of the Interface.