Günter Grass says Facebook is Shit. Don’t Share this on Facebook
A couple of months back in a conversation with a college professor who also happens to be a poet, I was informed that anyone who is on Facebook can’t possibly be a writer. This statement could be brushed aside as baloney coming from someone who has never been on the platform; puritanical till only where it is convenient when the same writers are writing poetry in over-priced, chic, urban cafes of Delhi’s Khan Market.
But whether or not your Facebook friend can be a writer is an entirely different debate from whether or not these social media sites are delaying the compilation of writings.
Since its advent social media has been seen as an evil — not only because it hinders creativity giving you an illusion of the same, but also because it pushes you further towards a vacuum packaged as something entirely different like all capitalist machineries do. So you waste your time without even experiencing the boredom that Walter Benjamin thought was necessary for storytelling.
Naturally, there have been detractors. While novelist and literary critic Jonathan Franzen seems to have made a life out of criticizing Facebook and Twitter, I recently stumbled upon this video of Günter Grass saying in his English-subtitled German that “Facebook is Shit”.
He tells us how he tells his children and grandchildren who are on Facebook that
Someone who has 500 friends, has no friends.
Grass who passed away in April 2015, stressed the need for direct contact
That direct experiences-direct contact, also in relation with a book-cannot be replaced by virtual stuff, however appealing it may be.
Making us aware that he would loathe a life with a mobile phone and living under surveillance, the German writer reasons that technology is no alternative to manual labour. Unlike many writers who shift technological allegiances with the passage of time Grass remained loyal to his old world habits
I still write my manuscripts by hand. Then I type them up on my old Olivetti typewriter. There’s no computer in my study. I don’t even have a mobile phone.
But while Grass did not, Franzen did adopt a “new Lenovo ultrabook computer” while criticizing Mac. So if you are a Grass fan you need not feel ideologically challenged reading this on your PC, iPad or iPhone and posting this on Facebook. Maybe it is just that Facebook, Twitter, PC, Mac aren’t just new enough to deserve your criticism. Two or three decades down the line they will come with something worth you looking away from it, till then you can sit back and enjoy this video that some YouTube user with close to 6000 subscribers has uploaded of Grass speaking.