Infinite Jest was published
in 1996.
Facebook began in 2004.
Wikipedia came out in 2001.
The iPhone hit the world in 2007.
David Foster Wallace died in 2008.
I’m about 150 pages in and, admittedly, simultaneously
confused and smitten. At this point, I’m into the writing. I am, however,
thinking much about the historicity.
This
link helps those who might be doing what I’m doing (Jill). I’ll try to post a character list next time.
Now, some passages that seem madly important for historical
analysis . . .
I love, so very much,
the piece on the “Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart”: “The woman, a
46-year-old Boston accountant with irreversible restenosis of the heart. . .
[was] pursuing her active schedule with the extraordinary prosthesis portably
installed in a stylish Etienne Aigner purse . . . [She] was actively window
shopping in Cambridge, Massachusetts’ fashionable Harvard Square when a
transvestite purse snatcher . . . brutally tore the life sustaining purse from
the woman’s unwitting grasp. The active, alert woman gave chase to the purse
snatching ‘woman’ for as long as she could, plaintively shouting to passersby
the words ‘Stop her! She stole my heart!’ . . .[P]assersby merely shook their
heads at one another, smiling knowingly at what they ignorantly presumed to be
yet another alternative lifestyle’s relationship gone sour.” Gold.
Then, there’s a lengthy
passage on the advent of video telephony and the return to voice-only
telephony. Why did it happen? “It turned out there was something terribly
stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn’t been stressful at all about
voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that
they’d been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion. . . Good old
traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the
person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also
permitting you not to have to pay anything close to complete attention to her .
. . Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable. Callers now found they
had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener’s
expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges . . . And the
videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried
at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who
doesn’t.” All of this morphs into the
creation of high-definition masks—first, for faces, and then, for the entire
body. Eventually, consumers—having had enough—go back to voice-only phones!
What would DFW have done with social media?
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