A Prescient Quote from "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace"

David Foster Wallace, discussing his book Infinite Jest and the addictive qualities of TV and the Internet:

"The technology's gonna get better and better at doing what it does, which is seduce us into being incredibly dependent on it, so that advertisers can be more confident that we will watch their advertisements. And as a technology system, it's amoral.

It doesn't...have a responsibility to care about us one whit more than it does: It's got a job to do. The moral job is ours. You know, Why am I watching five hours a day of this? I mean, why am I getting 75 percent of my calories from candy? I mean, that's something that a little tiny child would do, and that would be all right. But we're postpubescent, right? Somewhere along the line, we're supposed to have grown up...

I think one of the reasons that I feel empty after watching a lot of TV, and one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people. It's a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn't require anything of me. I mean, I can see them, they can't see me. And they're there for me, and I can receive from the TV, I can receive entertainment and stimulation. Without having to give anything back but the most tangential kind of attention. And that is very seductive.


The problem is it's also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I've gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know, I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up.

...as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up...at a certain point, we're gonna have to build some machinery inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable to be alone with images on a screeen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're gonna die."


It's difficult not to agree with DFW. While distraction in measured doses can be a beautiful thing, the cumulative presence of TV, Internet, gaming, cell phones, texting, IMing, smart phones, social media, and sundry other technologies has undeniably altered the ways in which we relate to other humans. I have lately acutely observed the flattened, sometimes surreal quality of relating online versus the depth of experience one feels in 3-D (aka “real” life).

Online communication adds a layer of abstraction that seems to confound my brain. There is the person to whom one is speaking, then there becomes this avatar, the recipient of the email, who, while resembling this person, is solely a cognitive/verbal entity. The physical field is completely wiped out, and the emotional field clouded. Online relating brings with it much space for interpretation, in a way that face-to-face encounters often do not. In person, we read people’s energy more quickly than we do their words, and in fact process what they say via how they look and how they say it. Actual verbal content has been proven to be just a small component in the communication process. How things are said—vocal intonation, gesture, pitch, volume, phrasing—holds much more sway. All of this is absent in virtual communication.

Email and the Internet have also impacted the length of our relationships to others. Virtual communication makes it very easy to jump ship—to move on to the next person, the next topic, to blow people off, to not spend a lot of time working through issues. There are simply too many other options, and we lose patience quickly. Like a baby averts its eyes from anything that disturbs it, we can easily perform a few mouse clicks and the offensive entity has been excised. And if I can’t see you, see the upset you may feel when I dismiss you, then it doesn’t exist, right?

So if we in our world allow ourselves to be passively entertained, and accept a dehumanizing medium as our predominant form of communication, over time, what is the end result? While Foster Wallace’s conclusion feels somewhat extreme at this moment in time, it's certainly not inconceivable.

“ …each generation has different things that force the generation to grow up. Maybe for our grandparents it was World War Two. For us, it’s gonna be that at…a certain point…we’re either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn’t all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being? And if we don’t do that then (a) as individuals, we’re gonna die, and (b) the culture’s gonna grind to a halt. Because we’re gonna get so interested in entertainment that we’re not gonna want to do the work that generates the income that buys the products that pays for the advertising that disseminates the entertainment. It just seems to be like it’s gonna be this very cool thing. Where the country could very well shut down and die, and it won’t be anybody else doin’ it to us, we will have done it to ourselves.”
























I highly recommend all of David Lipsky's fascinating book, which documents a 5-day road trip taken by the Rolling Stone correspondent and David Foster Wallace in 1996. It's both a compelling conversation and a glimpse into the writer's thought processes, interspersed with plenty of humor, humanity and bits of profundity. We're fortunate to have this transcript as a glimpse into Wallace's amazing mind.

Digital Nation

Did anyone catch PBS’s Frontline documentary Digital Nation last night? It was one of the more sad and sobering docs I’ve watched in a long while. Although I use computers far more than I’d like, I keep a few toes in the Luddite camp on the issue of digital technology and how it has severed some key elements that used to make life fun. To wit, the tangibility of physical objects and the joys of eye contact and in-person human relating.

Much of this program focuses on children and how steeped in technology their lives have become. In one extremely sad segment, young South Korean Internet addicts were filmed at a “detox” facility, trying to learn how to be kids again because Net gaming had taken over their lives. Digital Nation showed them learning how to jump rope and go outside to play in the 3-D landscape. Wow. These kids had been manipulated so very far from their instincts that they truly did look like they were being tortured by having to pry their fingers away from their keyboards. Apparently PC Baangs, arcades in which kids can play video games in stacked cubicles, are very popular in Asia—to an extreme extent. One child actually died because he played for 50 hours straight without bothering to pause for food or water. Just what we need—another source of addiction in the world.

Another segment examined the in-class behaviors of both grade school and college students. Obviously I am way out of the loop on this one, as I had no idea that children were allowed to bring both cell phones and laptops to school and use them while the teacher tries desperately to convey information. Once upon a time, this would have been considered extremely rude and distracting--probably because it’s extremely rude and distracting—and would have been banned. Producer Rachel Dretzin interviewed one vice-principal who seemed to be spending his days monitoring students’ Internet surfs during class. Give me a break! We’re paying educators to cyber-babysit?? How ‘bout either issuing students dumb terminals so they can’t be chatting on Facebook during class, pulling the plug on the school’s router, or….imagine this!...not having individual computers in the classroom? Is it really such ignoble idea to teach kids how to pay attention to one thing at once, instead of 5?

One high-schooler from affluent Chatham, NJ, proudly boasted that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d read a book. Couldn’t remember…. He was shown referring to an online version of Spark Notes for Romeo and Juliet, as he simply “didn’t have enough hours in the day to read the whole thing.” He seemed quite pleased with his “accomplishment” of having ingested the summary version in less than 5 minutes. No doubt the demands placed on him by Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, and MySpace are so onerous that he has no time to consider the pedestrian words of one of history’s greatest writers. Would anyone like to join me in slamming him up against a wall and shoving the complete works of Shakespeare through his smug little eyeballs?

And thus we stumble upon the popularity of books with titles like The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30).

As old, cranky, and out-of-touch as I may sound, it’s hard to be middle-aged and have known another way. Life used to have much more time in it. Much more serendipity. And much more pleasure. Relating the majority of our time to a machine has made us, as a society, much colder. More calculated and pragmatic. We want exactly what we want, and we want it NOW.  Just as technology serves our every whim, we expect people to do so as well. It has fashioned us into digital creeps.

I'm not sure where we're heading with all this. I try not to be xenophobic toward these "natives" of cyberspace, but it's tough to not feel some apprehension sneaking in. If we have ostensibly gained so much from the glut-of-information age, then why don't I feel happier? Smarter? Kinder? As effervescent as pink champagne? Why do all my most cherished memories not involve sitting around staring at a screen? Yesterday I stood on a long line at the PO, where everyone had tried to endure the wait by whipping out their smart phones. A 6-year-old boy whose mom had left for a few minutes was wandering up and down the line aimlessly, searching in vain for someone to look up from their screens and acknowledge him.

Some days it feels like that for me, too.

 [I like this topic. For further info, see my November blog entry, “Apocalypse How?”]