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Thursday 24 August 2017

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Twitter hits back after Jonathan Franzen outburst

The novelist Jonathan Franzen has called Twitter an "irresponsible medium" which has become the enemy of writers and readers.

Photo: Finn Beales 2012

The American author of The Corrections, who has previously criticised Facebook and ebooks, said at a talk in New Orleans: "Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose.

"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."

Franzen's tirade inspired Tweeters to set up the hashtag #JonathanFranzenHates – with suggestions of other irritations in the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author's life, including pies, kittens, baby ducks, and "anything under 250k words".

Last night the actress Minnie Driver joined in:

Other criticisms directed at the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author included:

The first Tweet in defense of the author was shouted down by other commentators yesterday.

Franzen famously cuts off all connection to the internet when he is writing. His novel 'Freedom', however, has its own Twitter account with 1,692 followers - not quite as impressive as Franzen's satirical Twitter writer, Emperor Franzen who is also followed by Penguin Books USA.

Emperor Franzen has responded to the recent hashtag campaign:

Speaking at the Hay Festival in Colombia in January, Franzen argued that e-books, such as Amazon’s Kindle, can never have the magic of the printed page.

“The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,” said Franzen.

In 2009 the invention of the term ‘Franzenfreude’ was coined by author Jennifer Weiner to describe “taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen”.

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