1 Anonymous 1969-12-31T17:00:00 [ImgOps] [iqdb]File:
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I like David Foster Wallace a lot, but man, his essay "E Unibus Pluram" is shockingly bad.
>For Gilder, the new piece of furniture that will free Joe Briefcase from passive dependence on his furniture will be "the telecomputer, a personal computer adapted for video processing and connected by fiberoptic threads to other trlecomputers around the world." The fibrous TC "will forever break the broadcast bottleneck" of television's One Over Many structure of image-dissemination.
>It's wildly unrealistic to think that expanded choices alone will resolve our televisual bind. The advent of cable upped choices from 4 or 5 to 40+ synchronic alternatives, with little apparent loosening of television's grip on mass attitudes. It seems, rather, that Gilder sees the '90s' impending breakthrough as U.S. viewers' graduation from passive reception of fascimilies of experience to active manipulation of fascimilies of e,experience. It's worth questioning Gilder's definition of televisual "passivity." His new tech would indeed end "the passivity of mere reception." But the passivity of Audience, the acquiescence inherent in a whole culture of and about watching, looks unaffected by TCs.
So this guy Gilder essentially describes the future of the internet, and Wallace's response is "nah, that won't change anything." And this was written in 1990. The internet wasn't some far-off sci-fi concept, it already existed in embryonic form. And his depiction of telecommuters in Infinite Jest shows that the significance of the internet eluded him even in 1996. Great author, but his inability to understand the difference between television and the internet is a serious mark against him.
