{"id":5597,"date":"2015-02-22T08:30:54","date_gmt":"2015-02-22T15:30:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5597"},"modified":"2015-02-22T08:35:56","modified_gmt":"2015-02-22T15:35:56","slug":"gilligan-franzen-facebook-tv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5597","title":{"rendered":"@Gilligan #Franzen #Facebook #TV"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tvsets\"<\/a><\/p>\n

From Susan Lerner’s interview<\/a> with Jonathan Franzen in Booth<\/em>:<\/p>\n

SL:<\/strong>\u00a0I want to ask you about technology and social media. …\u00a0I was wondering, given your change of heart about television and its place within our culture, can you comment on this conversion and the possibility that social media might also one day redeem itself?<\/p>\n

JF:<\/strong>\u00a0TV redeemed itself by becoming more like the novel, which is to say: interested in sustained, morally complex narrative that is compelling and enjoyable. How that happens with pictures of you and your friends at T. G. I. Friday\u2019s isn\u2019t clear to me. Twitter isn\u2019t even trying to be a narrative form. Its structure is antithetical to sustained and carefully considered story-telling. How does a structure like that suddenly turn itself into narrative art? You could say, well,\u00a0Gilligan\u2019s Island<\/em>\u00a0wasn\u2019t art, either. But\u00a0Gilligan\u2019s Island<\/em>\u00a0paved the way, by being twenty-two minutes of a narrative, however dumb, to the twenty-two minutes of\u00a0Nurse Jackie<\/em>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

SL:<\/strong>\u00a0You see a trajectory?<\/p>\n

JF:<\/strong>\u00a0Yes, you can see the trajectory there. Which is the same trajectory that the novel itself followed. There was a lot of really bad experimentation in the seventeenth century as we were trying to work out these fundamental problems of \u201cIs this narrative pretending to be true? Is it acknowledging that it\u2019s\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0true? Are novels only about fantastical things? Where does everyday life fit in?\u201d There were a couple of centuries of sorting that out before the novel really got going in Richardson and Fielding, and then, soon after, culminating in Austen. You can see that maturation in movies as well. You had\u00a0Birth of a Nation<\/em>\u00a0before you had\u00a0The\u00a0<\/em>Rules of the Game<\/em>. It takes a while for artistic media to mature\u2014I take that point\u2014but I don\u2019t know anyone who thinks that social media is an artistic medium. It\u2019s more like another phone, home movies, email, whatever. It\u2019s like a better version of the way people socially interacted in the past, a more technologically advanced version. But if you use your Facebook page to publish chapters of a novel, what you get is a novel, not Facebook. It\u2019s a struggle to imagine what value is added by the technology itself.<\/p>\n

SL:<\/strong>\u00a0I think there\u2019s an argument that can be made about new technology providing different forms and twists on established ideas, so people can examine\u2014<\/p>\n

JF:<\/strong>\u00a0I\u2019m just looking at the phenomenology of this technology in everyday life.<\/p>\n

SL:<\/strong>\u00a0Pictures of desserts.<\/p>\n

JF:<\/strong>\u00a0Yeah, pictures of desserts and the fact that you can\u2019t sit still for five minutes without sending and receiving texts. I mean, it does not look like any form of engagement with art that I recognize from any field. It looks like a distraction and an addiction and a tool. A useful tool. I\u2019m not a technophobe. I\u2019m on the internet all day, every day, except when I\u2019m actually trying to write, and even then I\u2019m on a computer and using, often, material that I\u2019ve taken from the internet. It\u2019s not that I have technophobia. It\u2019s the notion that somehow this is a transformative, liberating thing that I take issue with, when it seems to me more like a perfection of the free market\u2019s infiltration of every aspect of a human being\u2019s waking life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s interesting \u2014 this is an aside \u2014 how deeply Gilligan’s Island<\/em> managed to engrave itself into the cultural worldview<\/a> of a certain generation of Americans. Despite its surface dumbness, the show, I would suggest, carries a mythical weight, what with the totemic quality of the characters \u2014 scientist,\u00a0celebrity, tycoon, seafarer, etc. \u2014 and the Promethean nature\u00a0of the plot.<\/p>\n

O, unscepter’d isle, demi-paradise, demi-hell!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Susan Lerner’s interview with Jonathan Franzen in Booth: SL:\u00a0I want to ask you about technology and social media. …\u00a0I was wondering, given your change of heart about television and its place within our culture, can you comment on this conversion and the possibility that social media might also one day redeem itself? JF:\u00a0TV redeemed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5597"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5607,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5597\/revisions\/5607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}