Jonathan Franzen: 'Twitter is the ultimate irresponsible medium'

This article is more than 8 years old
After criticising Facebook and the ebook, Jonathan Franzen has warned of the dangers of Twitter
Jonathan Franzen
Turning on Twitter ... Jonathan Franzen. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
Turning on Twitter ... Jonathan Franzen. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
Wed 7 Mar 2012 08.01 EST

Jonathan Franzen, no friend to the rapid onward march of technology, has now turned his ire on Twitter, reportedly describing the microblogging site as "unspeakably irritating" at a book reading.

The author Jami Attenberg was at a talk given by Franzen at Tulane University in New Orleans on 5 March, and took notes on some of the novelist's comments. After dismissing the ending of Revolutionary Road as "falsely bleak" and telling his audience that "there's something goofy about American literature since modernism came to an end", the celebrated author of Freedom and The Corrections moved on to social media.

"Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose," said Franzen, according to Attenberg. "It's hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters … It's like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it's like writing a novel without the letter 'P'… It's the ultimate irresponsible medium. People I care about are readers … particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves."

Far from prompting a mass Twitter exodus, however, Franzen's reported comments gave rise to the hashtag #JonathanFranzenhates on the website. According to tweeters' yakking, the novelist hates everything from "Emoticons, because it takes 600 pages to accurately convey emotion", to puppies, people who hate Jar Jar Binks, and cameras, because "real pictures should be painted".

Attenberg said she was "sort of infuriated" by Franzen's comments about Twitter. "Not that he's incorrect about how much social networking can suck your time, because it can, but because he doesn't understand that a lot of writers have to use the medium as a promotional device as well as a way to build networks," she explained. Franzen, she said, "doesn't have to do anything! He has a publicist who probably has dreams about him every night, whether he has a book coming out or not. He is free to write and just be himself, while the rest of us are struggling to be heard and recognised. He will never understand how hard it is to get ahead as a writer, never again in his life. I'm not suggesting he's old-fashioned. I'm suggesting he has lost perspective."

Franzen, who avoids the internet while he writes, has previously laid out his reasons for disliking ebooks: reading a book on a screen feels too impermanent, he believes, and he worries "that it's going to be very hard to make the world work if there's no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government."

Admitted Franzen: "Very probably, you're sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds." But last year he also criticised Facebook, where, he said, "we star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery. And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don't have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It's all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors."

The #JonathanFranzenhates hashtag is unlikely to persuade the novelist of social media's benefits.


We have Storified a few of our favourite #Jonathanfranzenhates tweets. If you're reading this on a mobile device, click here to see them

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