From Susan Lerner’s interview with Jonathan Franzen in Booth:

SL: I want to ask you about technology and social media. … I 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: TV 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’s isn’t clear to me. Twitter isn’t 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, Gilligan’s Island wasn’t art, either. But Gilligan’s Island paved the way, by being twenty-two minutes of a narrative, however dumb, to the twenty-two minutes of Nurse Jackie. 

SL: You see a trajectory?

JF: Yes, 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 “Is this narrative pretending to be true? Is it acknowledging that it’s not true? Are novels only about fantastical things? Where does everyday life fit in?” 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 Birth of a Nation before you had The Rules of the Game. It takes a while for artistic media to mature—I take that point—but I don’t know anyone who thinks that social media is an artistic medium. It’s more like another phone, home movies, email, whatever. It’s 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’s a struggle to imagine what value is added by the technology itself.

SL: I think there’s an argument that can be made about new technology providing different forms and twists on established ideas, so people can examine—

JF: I’m just looking at the phenomenology of this technology in everyday life.

SL: Pictures of desserts.

JF: Yeah, pictures of desserts and the fact that you can’t 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’m not a technophobe. I’m on the internet all day, every day, except when I’m actually trying to write, and even then I’m on a computer and using, often, material that I’ve taken from the internet. It’s not that I have technophobia. It’s 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’s infiltration of every aspect of a human being’s waking life.

It’s interesting — this is an aside — how deeply Gilligan’s Island managed to engrave itself into the cultural worldview 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 — scientist, celebrity, tycoon, seafarer, etc. — and the Promethean nature of the plot.

O, unscepter’d isle, demi-paradise, demi-hell!