In a Guardian Q&A tied to his new book, Joshua Ferris tells interviewer Tim Adams about being a novelist in the Internet Age:

“Question:

The Internet in the book is often seen as a conversely destructive force. Is that your experience?

Joshua Ferris:

I think it’s a force of anxiety. Anyone who wants to be completely sure of their information – personal, political, historical – is faced with a huge number of sources willing to provide it. It can be a very dubious place. A hall of mirrors with diminishing returns.

Question:

Have you made a conscious effort to block out some of that information when you are writing?

Joshua Ferris:

I don’t belong to social media at all. Not for any principled reason, but because I don’t want to spend the time on it. I do think books are harder to read when you move away from the quick cuts of the internet. You have to reach back for your attention span. If you’ve spent two hours looking at 6,000 very different web pages it’s difficult to concentrate on a single story that requires sustained attention. I don’t think books are going to go away. I think maybe they’re going to become a more fine taste.

Question:

Do you think the pervasiveness of that screen culture also makes novels harder to write?

Joshua Ferris:

Not if the novelist is a novelist. The determined novelist is just interested in the fact that she must write novels.”