"When [Jonathan Franzen] started writing, a writer could just put his work out into the world without having to explain it...."

"But now being a writer, particularly one who wanted to be in the public favor, meant that you... had to participate. You had to hang out on social media. He hates social media — dreads it, saw it coming the whole time. He had already been on the fence about digital interaction since even before he wrote about Nicholas Negroponte’s 'Being Digital' in 1995 for The New Yorker. 'He was so excited about the prospect of a future in which you wouldn’t get the dull, old New York Times,' Franzen told me. 'You’d get via the web a new service called The Daily Me. It would consist only of things that were personally interesting to you and that suited your own view of the world. That’s exactly what we got. What’s crazy is [Negroponte] thought this was this wonderful, almost utopian possibility in the future.' Franzen found it absurd that anyone would celebrate the notion of not being faced with opposing points of view. 'I’ve never been a big fan of society structured predominantly along lines of consumerism, but I had made my peace with it,' he said. 'But then when it began to be that every individual person also had to be a product that they were selling and liking became paramount, that seemed like a very worrisome thing at a personal level as a human being. If you’re in a state of perpetual fear of losing market share for you as a person, it’s just the wrong mind-set to move through the world with.'"

Writes Taffy Brodesser-Akner in "Jonathan Franzen Is Fine With All of It/The internet has turned on him, his book sales are down and the TV adaptation of his last novel has stalled. But he wants you to know one thing: He’s not even angry" (NYT).

ADDED: If you're looking for Franzen's 1995 New Yorker essay about Negroponte, it's in his collection "How to Be Alone," which I already had in my Kindle. See? I blogged about it on April 13, 2013:

These days, books are bought as ebooks, so you don't have to buy 2 copies of everything, you just have to authorize 2 Kindles/iPads on the same account — which is what Meade and I do — and the husband and wife can simultaneously read the same book or — as in our case — the same 300 books that we wander around in endlessly, perhaps eventually encountering a passage that we'd underline electronically if the other hadn't already done the underlining. Are there any marital therapy books? Not unless "Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank" counts. Or "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Or "The Obamas." Or — this has a self-helpish title — "How to Be Alone."

From Franzen's 1995 essay:

High above the clouds, the sun always shines. Negroponte paints a tomorrow of talking toasters, smart refrigerators, and flavorized computers (“You will be able to buy a Larry King personality for your newspaper interface”) that is Jetsons-like in its retention of today’s suburban values. To find clues to a deeper transformation, you have to read between the lines. Negroponte has a habit, for example, of reducing human functions to machinery: the human eye is “the client for the image,” an ear is a “channel,” faces are “display devices,” and “Disney’s guaranteed audience is refueled at a rate that exceeds 12,500 births each hour.” In the future, “CD-ROMs may be edible, and parallel processors may be applied like sun tan lotion.” The new, digital human being will dine not only on storage devices but on narcissism. “Newspapers will be printed in an edition of one . . . Call it The Daily Me.” Authors, meanwhile, as they move from text to multimedia, will assume the role of “stage-set or theme-park designer.”