Is the Internet Good for Writing? Part 2: Negative

By Ben Yagoda. Last week we took a look at Clive Thompson’s claim that the Internet has brought about a Golden Age of prose. The novelist Jonathan Franzen would beg to differ. He recently published an essay in The Guardian, on the early-20th-century Austrian satirist and editor Karl Kraus, that included some swipes at the Internet’s catastrophic effect on writing. (Getting him on the subject was that Kraus didn’t care for the technology of his day.) Franzen notes his “disappointment when a novelist who I believe ought to have known better, Salman Rushdie, succumbs to Twitter” and when, in a “celebration” of the online literary cosmos, the magazine N+1 “somehow neglects to consider the Internet’s accelerating pauperization of freelance writers.” Read more...