As Beth Driscoll points out, “For Franzen, mass media is a kind of noise that interferes with legitimate literary practices. It is also a mechanism for the dilution of literary quality.” He’s nostalgic for “the days when cultural gatekeeping occurred out of sight, away from the public forums of the internet and Twitter.”47 The hierarchy Franzen desires is maintained largely because of its exclusion of people like Weiner and her readers: of course he’d think Twitter, and the amplification of Weiner’s arguments about taste culture, was “intolerably shallow.”
