Franzen and Technology
James Oliver Smith, Jr
2012 0131
The Telegraph in Britain posted an article with the headline: "Jonathan Franzen: e-books are damaging society" (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9047981/Jonathan-Franzen-e-books-are-damaging-society.html). Franzen had given a speech at the Hay Festival in Cartagena, Colombia, Britain's "top Festival of the Arts" (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/). I was reading the article on the web, through a netbook connected to the internet trough a wifi access point in a coffee shop in the Open Book, a literary center in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the United States, 4000 miles away. The article starts off saying that "consumers had been conned into thinking that they need the latest technology." This is interesting to me because it was through many levels of technology that I was able to read what he said. I guess you could say that I "needed" this technology to hear his message. Was I "conned" into thinking that I needed this technology to even be aware that this speech was given? Well, I guess I could have waited several months for his speech to be written down on paper, transported via carriage to a ship, sailed to the U.S. and galloped in a satchel on horseback to the distant plains of Minnesota.
He goes on to say that his "favorite" technology is a paperback book, a technology that he can spill water on and it will "still work". Now, I have spilled more than my share of water on paper books and I have had to throw many of them away since they were unreadable because the book fell apart, the ink ran or the pages stuck together, so the point seems to be somewhat irrelevant. Seeming to believe that his point was well made he states that for "serious" readers "permanence" is "part of the experience". Then he follows up saying that everything in life is "fuid" and that "text" doesn't change. This is where he looses me entirely. He steps away from the medium on which a text is displayed (the treebook, presumably) and refers to the text itself, implying that "permanence" is somehow accomplished through the binding of a treebook to the text. I guess he hasn't paid much attention the many variations of classical texts published on papyrus, vellum and wood pulp over the centuries.
His efforts to pin "capitalism" to the advent of ebooks also seems rather strained since it is the capitalist brick and mortar and treebook publishing industry that is being pulled into the ebook publishing domain againsts it capitalistic will. It is consumer demand driving the process more than any capitalistic impulse, in much the same way that consumer download sites drove the music industry into the debundled world of lower cost music sales. Project Gutenburg has been preserving (for free) the texts of thousands of out-of-print and out-of-copyright books in digital archives since 1972, long before the current ebook technologies were feasible. This has made many books available that were long forgotten and buried by the traditional publishing industry. Ebooks are simply the next step in the reading experience, one in which the user controls the presentation of the "permanent" text.
He claims that electronic text is somehow more tempting to "delete", "change" and "move" than (presumably) non-electronic text. What? I have been in many a coffee house, office and workshop in which I have seen handwritten and manually typed (before word processors) manuscripts marked up, scratched out and manually cut up and moved. I have no idea what universe Mr. Franzen has been living in, but it seems to have no relevance to the universe I have experienced for the past 60 years. It must be the same universe where all families are nuclear, all wars are justified and all indigenous people have lived in harmony with the environment.
Moving on to an appreciation for a U.S. President who reads (Obama), the ineffectiveness of European politicians and a response to accusationsthat there is no religion in his novels, he ends up saying "To be honest, I'm thinking much more about science than about religion when I'm writing. To me, art itself is a religion." In other words, "Science" is the foundation of his "art" which is his "religion." Since "science" is the foundation upon which technology is built I wonder if Mr. Franzen was "conned" (by capitalism) into needing "science" to create "art", his "religion" ... il matto ...
(c) James Oliver Smith, Jr.
