Over the weekend I read "
The Kraus Project", the newest book by
Jonathan Franzen. In it Franzen translates a couple of texts written by Viennese satirist
Karl Kraus roughly 100 years ago in "Die Fackel". The translations are explained with a multitude of explanatory and autobiographical footnotes put together by Franzen,
Paul Reitter and
Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus in general was sceptic of technological change and Franzen describes him as
"Kraus was the first great instance of a writer fully experiencing how modernity, whose essence is the accelerating rate of change, in itself creates the conditions for personal apocalypse."
And somewhere on page 273 of the book a passage in the footnotes struck me as a noteworthy counterargument to the current altmetrics craze:
The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world. (Kraus's dictate "Sing, bird, or die" could now read "Tweet, bird, or die.") But what happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter self-promotional decibel levels?
A video on the book project can be found
here.
SF
