Franzen on the Unspeakable Irritation That is Facebook... & Twitter

On Facebook:"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 New York Times, Op-Ed, 5.28.11 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/29franzen.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all


And, on Twitter:
"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."


-Tulane University address, 3.5.12


Keep heaping on that scorn, Jon. We love it!