The vanity and banality of the Author Online

On self-reification and social media

I need to thank social media, especially Twitter, for greatly reducing my TBR pile. These days it is customary to blame social media for one’s loss of focus but I’m not talking about this. What I mean is that there is a large number of writers whose work I intentionally avoid because of their online verbosity. Their opinion-incontinence about every single world event and their tireless broadcasting of everyday banality — but more importantly their constant pseudo-candid disclosure of the minutiae of the writerly metier¹ — has put me off reading them. You see, I am of the idea that the more you know writers the less interesting their work becomes. For that reason I keep those I admire at a certain distance — I don’t want to get to know them too well because behind an interesting piece of writing there is very often a very pedestrian person like me.²

I know this will come across as odious, because it is also now customary to pretend that everyone is interesting, that everyone has somethin…