What is the main point of Sven Birkerts' essay "Into the Electronic Millenium"? http://bostonreview.net/BR16.5/birkerts.html

In his essay titled “Into the Electronic Millenium,” Sven
Birkerts suggests that humanity is presently at a turning point in which the culture of
the printed word, especially printed literature, is coming to an end and is being
replaced by a culture emphasizing the digital presentation of information. As Birkerts
himself puts it,

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This is a shift happening throughout our
culture, away from the patterns and habits of the printed page, and toward a
terra nova [that is, a new world] governed almost entirely by
electronic
communications.

Birkerts
worries that the transition from print and books to data and computers will lead to
various unfortunate consequences, including the
following:

• Because we now have electronic access
  to so many different and far-flung places at once than we used to have, no place will
  now seem really special or unique. A kind of sameness will descend on our experience of
  the world:

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Every place once unique–itself–is strangely shot
through with radiations from every other
place.

• Fewer and
  fewer people now read newspapers and other forms of printed communications. Instead they
  rely on electronic media as sources of information. This change is unfortunate, because
  print forces us to think and to be actively engaged, whereas when we receive information
  through digital means (such as television), we tend to be mere passive receptors. When
  we read a newspaper or book, we are in control of the pace at which we read and of our
  progression through the material; when we passively watch television, the machine
  determines, in every way, our experience.  We thus lose individuality. As Birkerts puts
  it,

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With visual media, impression and image take
precedence over logic and
concept.

• Visual
  media focus on the experience of the present moment, and thus a sense of history and of
  the past is lost. One symptom of this loss of historical consciousness may be the rise
  of so-called “postmodernism,” in which distinctions between specific historical periods
  are lost.


• Birkerts worries that the subtleties and
  complexities of communication and of language fostered by a print culture will be lost
  and will be replaced by language that is simpler, plainer, more streamlined, and less
  interesting.


• He also worries that curricula will be
  simplified or dumbed-down because students will no longer have much practical training
  in reading, in complex reasoning, and in the appreciation of the nuances and subtleties
  of language.


• Because we will be so much involved in the
  present, in the now, our conceptions of the past are likely to
  become more superficial, less complex, more
  cartoonish.


• The new media may discourage people from
  thinking for themselves.  This change may therefore result in a loss of individuality
  and privacy. Society may run the risk of becoming a huge collective, rooted less and
  less in complex thought by distinct individuals and rooted more and more in mass trends
  in which people respond to collective stimuli rather than doing the hard work of reading
  and of really thinking for themselves.