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...en a discussion over Henry James' "Brooksmith" revealed that the students were frustrated by the reading, Birkets' saw the future of intense reading from an alarming perspective: The fast pace of our lives has led to looking at reading classic works as a “chore” (Birkerts 54). In the overall picture, Birkerts is saying that for many people, reading has become almost as an alternative method for receiving media into our daily lives. But what is more disturbing than this, is the fact that most people don’t even realize that this is happening. Because of the everyday advancements in digital media and computer technology, people are becoming more and more reliant through visual means when it comes to obtaining information or knowledge about the world around them. Birkerts also feels that in today’s world, intelligence is hardly based on how well read a person is, but seems to be based more on who can navigate the Internet, and who can master the gadgets of today's world. This results in a loss of relying on our chronological sense of origin and history. Birkerts also says that, “the advent of the computer and the astonishing sophistication achieved by our electronic communications media have together turned a range of isolated changes into something ‘systemic’.”(Birkerts 51) By this, Birkerts is explaining how in today’s society, people are dependant on the “system” of media, machines, computers, and outside sources to find out “truth” and what’s right and wrong instead of determining it by their own moral judgments and natural instinct. Birkerts fears that electronic media are turning us into shallow creatures who have given up the struggle to find the answers to the questions that humankind has asked since the beginning of time: who are we? what is our purpose? He mentions how over time, we have trained ourselves to computer literacy to find ways to speed up our performance and ignoring the massive transformations taking place in our lives in the background. Our ability to ask these kinds of questions differentiates us from any other living creature on earth. According to Birkerts, literature is the "repository of our collective speculation" on the answers to those questions. From it, he’s saying how one cannot simply browse through a computer-generated, hypertext abstract of information in order to understand its meaning, and that one must rather experience it deeply and intensively through traditional reading with the mind. Our world of "electronic postmodernity," has exploded with so much data that we have lost our attention span and given up any premise of understanding. When we read, we tend to skim, covering large amounts of information as quickly as possible, but not focusing very strongly on any of it or placing much of it within any meaningful context. We read "extensively," but not "intensively" (Stephenson 1). When books were existed in rather few amounts, wisdom seemed almost within the grasp of the average intellectual (Stephenson 2). Today, we are embarrassed by words like "wisdom", and employ and depend on computers and machines to manage our knowledge and information instead. Sven Birkerts mentions in his essay how the increasing advances in technology and influence of electronic media has only worsened our sense and reliability on our chronological sense of origin and history. By history, Birkerts is referring to the significant historical events that have occurred in our world in the past. A crucial topic that can be related to this issue is the subject of postmodernism and Robert Eaglestone’s essay, “Postmodernism and Holocaust Denial”. By definition, postmodernism means: of or relating to art, architecture, or literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles, as by reintroducing traditional or classical elements of style or by carrying modernist styles or practices to extremes (Dictionary.com). According to Eaglestone, postmodernism originated as a response to the Holocaust. In his essay, he argues for the central importance of the Holocaust in understanding what happened, and goes on to explore what the Holocaust means for rationality, ethics, and for the idea of what it is to be human. Through it, Eaglestone explains how postmodernism has come to a point where studying and writing history the correct way has become more of a political issue and has eventually turned into something so abstract that it will forever distort our perception of the “truth” and our knowledge of our own history. A film that greatly takes all these issues involving identity, origin, belief, reality, and the truth int...