Nick Hornby, Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith are among a growing group of
novelists who struggle with internet-addiction. Carl Wilkinson investigates the
powerful effect of the web on the creative mind
Internet addiction: 'I can see
it as something that needs to be put down, as an alcoholic puts down drink’
Photo: Design by piero fornasetti. photograph
courtesy of interfoto /alamy
Tucked away in the acknowledgements at the back of her new novel NW, along
with the names of friends, family, editors and publishers who have helped her,
Zadie Smith thanks freedom and self-control “for creating the time”.
Every writer needs the freedom to be creative and the self-control to stick
with a project until completion, but Smith has something rather more 21st
century in mind: Freedom © and SelfControl© are computer applications that can
be downloaded and configured to increase productivity by blocking access to the
internet.
These two pieces of software originated in quite different places. Freedom
was developed by Fred Stutzman, visiting assistant professor at the University
of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science, and counts Nick
Hornby, Dave Eggers and Naomi Klein among its users. Stutzman has also released
Anti-Social, which blocks the social-media elements of the internet.
SelfControl, meanwhile, was created in 2009 by American artist Steve Lambert,
one of the people behind The New York Times Special Edition – a hoax copy of the
paper published in November 2008.
It seems that Smith, Hornby, Eggers and the rest have taken to heart a
comment made in 2010 by Jonathan Franzen, who famously wrote portions of The
Corrections wearing a blindfold and earplugs to reduce disruptions: “It’s
doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing
good fiction.” Clearly the distractions of YouTube cat videos, unsolicited
tweets and the ping of an email arriving in your inbox are not conducive to
writing an intricately structured 100,000-word novel.
Eight out of 10 people in Britain now have access to the internet and Ofcom’s
Communications Market Report 2012, published in July, found that internet users
in the UK now spend on average 24.6 hours per month online – more than double
the amount of time spent online in January 2004. Meanwhile, internet access in
the British workplace increased by 27 per cent between 2004 and 2008, from the
equivalent of 5.9 million employees to 7.5 million, according to the Office for
National Statistics.
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