Nonwrestler Blog

TV, computers, reading... thinking up titles sucks

I've been waddling through another David Foster Wallace book of articles, and got particularly excited about one essay on US fiction writing and television. He's basically looking into the impact of the oft-touted 6-hours-a-day of TV-watching on Americans and therefore American authors.

He digs deep into how he thinks TV functions and how a society of watchers are in turn more and more paranoid about being watched... It's the kind of thing that's probably more persuasive when you read through all his explanations about it, but he's really on the money, I reckon: TV's rewards to the viewer are indulging fantasies and that's not in itself a bad thing, but near-constant indulgence will fuck you up faster than your mum & dad. ;) He returns multiple times to the image of a treat - e.g. chocolate cake is not actually the devil, but eating chocolate cake even 50% of the time wouldn't be good for you.

There's a lot more in there about irony and passivity and how the powerful tools of post-modernism (rebellious / destructive / not offering alternatives) have been happily absorbed into TV's own content so we get to feel like the cognoscenti smarter than the mass of TV viewers while still being the mass of TV viewers. It's good times, I promise you. It's also almost painfully balanced and well thought out, which my summary probably doesn't convey.

ANYWAY, the most intriguing bit in the article is where Wallace's mulling over the future. It's written in 1990. He does a kind of mini-review of a book about how the TV techology is the issue and that once that's revised things will be sweet. The revised tech the book talks about is removing the master-slave relationship of broadcaster and TV set, replacing them with some device that allows you to receive the video and images you want, manipulate and tailor them to your whims, and feed your versions back into a collaborative space where othes can continue to do the same.

Wallace dismisses this pie-in-the-sky talk as no kind of fix for the underlying problems. I obviously don't have to spell out the irony in either me being here blogging that I agree with him, nor that he seems to see the possibility as far-fetched. Still, I think the current state of play vindicates his predictions about what would happen if such "telecomputers" did start to muscle out traditional TV. That the passivity and people's assumption of the role of viewer rather than real participant still remain, in the very real sense that you're still sitting in front of a box and the coolest stuff for the largest number of people still comes from media companies. If anything it's yet more seductive - that increased feeling of your own personal power with no actual effect.

I'd love to hear Wallace's views on how things have transpired, but he killed himself last year.

I've deliberately skipped over all the stuff about literature, because I'm feeling sour about people bothering to read anything more than a few lines of text on a website anyway. :p

Labels: life, meta

Posted at 10:24 AM