From a Mark Tapson article at Acculturated:
Jonathan Franzen is serious about literature. “Serious writers and readers, these are my people,” he reportedly said at a Tulane talk. In recent interviews he has expressed contempt for technological shifts affecting those writers and readers, shifts he finds deeply unserious, from social media to the self-publishing boom being facilitated by Amazon.com.
Franzen is one of America’s most accomplished contemporary novelists. In 2010 the New York Times called his number one bestseller Freedom a “masterpiece of American fiction.” Oprah Winfrey crowned it one of her Book Club picks. He also made the cover of Time magazine in 2010, the first living novelist in a decade to do so. His 2001 novel The Corrections won the National Book Award for Fiction and was a Pulitzer finalist.
He didn’tearn those kudos by screwing around on the worldwide web. Franzen disables his internet connection when he writes, and has contempt for the time-sucking, narcissistic ephemera of social media. Twitter he calls “unspeakably irritating,” and Facebook he slams as a “private hall of flattering mirrors.”
As you might guess, Franzen is very OldSchool aboutebooks too, which he finds unsettling: “A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.”
As for the technology that now enables anyone to self-publish, not just “serious writers,” that too disturbs Franzen’s literary sensibility. In an article for the Guardian Review, he sharply criticized Amazon.com’s dominance as an online platform for self-published writers. He came close to likening head honcho Jeff Bezos to the anti-Christ for the changes his company has wrought for writers and readers alike: “Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion.”
