Jonathan Franzen is wrong: the digital age is making us smarter

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Writer Franzen
Jonathan Franzen at the Hay literary festival in Cartagena Photograph: STRINGER/COLOMBIA/REUTERS




If the printed word were the guardian of all democratic values, how is it that the country where, in 1439, a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press succumbed almost 500 years later to a totalitarian hell, in which books, and the knowledge in them, were suppressed with a relatively small number of bonfires? Ink on paper is no more a guarantor of good government than oil paint on canvas.




Let's go back to oil paint. This is a winter in London of three extraordinary one-man shows by the contemporary artists Gerhard Richter and David Hockney and the late Lucian Freud . In the great majority of work, the artists used oil paint, a technique invented during Gutenberg's lifetime, probably by the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, who is credited with combining mineral pigments with an oil medium that eventually dried.

Photography, film and digitally generated images came along, each apparently certain to make the slow process of painting in oils redundant. But that never happened. In the 21st century, Richter, Hockney and Freud still found they could best express their response to the physical world, or what was inside their heads, by making marks on a canvas with oil paint. The point is that humanity goes on adding to the available means of self-expression and communication, and very few forms or techniques are eliminated in the process, which is one reason to celebrate the possibilities of this extraordinary moment in history. Incidentally, no one demonstrates the open-mindedness and opportunism necessary to our times better than Hockney, who represents the same landscape, using oil, watercolour, an iPad and a battery of video cameras mounted on a van that moves slowly down a lane.

Naturally, few of us read in the way that Dickens's audience did, but that is because of a deficit of time, not necessarily one of attention. We do, however, read and write more every year. The statistics of our hyperactivity are astounding and show, for instance, that the information passing through our minds has risen threefold in the past 30 years and increases by about 6% every year. An office worker processes an average 20,000 emails per year (and this rises by about 14% every year); an American teenager is likely to send and receive about 3,339 texts each month; Facebook gets well over 100 billion hits every day, while Twitter records about 1 billion tweets every week. Imagine the reading and writing involved in all this.

So, the truth is that serious books such as Franzen's Freedom or The Corrections have to compete for our time, whether in print or on a screen. But if a book is good, it will earn the effort and reflection that no doubt Franzen's books deserve. Yet this is not an entitlement and the idea that we are becoming incapable of sustained attention simply doesn't hold up, as the sales of complicated science books attest. Indeed, I have a strong sense that the web has vastly increased our collective intelligence; that we are better informed, shrewder and able to grasp things more quickly than we were 20 years ago.

With this enormous brain at our fingertips, our intelligence is evolving and that means that writers and their writing will also evolve. The ebook is part of this and writers should grasp the opportunity with all the lack of self-consciousness and wonder that Hockney demonstrates in his use of the iPad. For one thing, there is so much fun to be had.


Even if we are to concede that people are less capable of devoting the necessary attention to a great work of art than we used to be, which I don't, we should not forget that publishers and the literary priesthood fear the revolution in publishing for as many bad reasons as good. This is as much about a loss of influence and income as it is about the concern for our literary nourishment.

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