A lot of things. And one of them, apparently, is Twitter, which Franzen took the opportunity to bemoan at an event in Tulane last night. He is said to have told his audience:
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.(Twitter devotees may find the following sentence rather difficult to read.) He's actually correct. Twitter has a propensity — depending, of course, on the people whom one follows — to be irritating beyond expression. Not long after the semi-luddite Franzen made his comments, a Twitter hashtag had already been coined. And as David Haglund rightly posits, the meme itself proves the internet's antagonist right:
I use Twitter, and I enjoy it, but it genuinely is hard to "cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters." Yes, the connectivity it helps to provide seems to have aided some truly important political movements, so I would never say that it "stands for everything I oppose." But when I see its fans tweet something like this [tweet pictured], I have to side with those who believe that emotions are indeed complex enough to merit 600-page novels, and cannot be fully conveyed in an emoticon. I don't think emoticons and 600-page novels are mutually exclusive; it appears that the universe is capacious enough to include both these phenomena, and I don't intend to choose sides. But if people start making teams, I know which one I would rather be on.We've posted about Franzen before, incase you're wondering.