Mike Rossmassler

I thought of your post while reading this excerpt today from Alice W. Flaherty's "The Midnight Disease: The drive to write, writer's block and the creative brain":

pp.217-8

Graphomania, the desire to be published, thus exists in partial distinction from hypegraphia, which is merely an excessive desire to write. Kundera argued that graphomania arises from emotional isolation and ennui, and:

takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions:
1) a high enough degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities;
2) an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the individual;
3) a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation. (In this connection I find it symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel.)

For Kundera, mass graphomania threatens the meaning of the written word because the resulting flood of words drowns out the chance for anyone to be heard. Yet he was writing in 1980, even before the tidal wave of the Internet. After Kundera's marvelous cynicism, it would perhaps be banal to be optimistic. In fact, though, the Web's flood has so far been surprisingly well channeled with powerful search engines (again, technology helping writing) and has successfully allowed isolated people to connect to one another. It is perhaps not the existence of Web diaries or blogs, but the fact that many other people read them that is the marvel.