David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace died last Friday by suicide. In the late nineties, after Infinite Jest came out, a friend of mine was living with a producer at a bare-bones cable access talk show in Southern California. Once she showed me an interview with Wallace that her boyfriend had taped. Wallace was nervous, sweating, a little paranoid, worrying on-camera that people would actually see the interview, fretting that he would come off wrong, and so forth. If you’ve had conversations with extremely self-conscious, hyper-intelligent, depressed people you would recognize the style – arguing with oneself while second- and third-guessing the meanings and intentions of the interlocutor. Defensive, and very, very uncomfortable, but at the same time self-aggrandizing and annoyed. Clearly the man was not having a good day. He was pretty famous at this point among those of us who were searching for a generational spokesperson other than Douglas Coupland. My friend and I laughed and felt a little sorry for him. It was pathetic, but endearing. He was so talented. After seeing the tape, I also thought he was lucky, because the crippling self-doubt on display in the interview hadn’t prevented him from doing it. This was about ten years ago. In more recent footage of Wallace (on youtube) he’s soft-spoken, but not visibly terrified. Maybe he perfected a sort of persona for the purpose of appearing in public – and he taught creative writing so his students probably trained him to hold his cards a little closer to his chest. (Some students react to a nervous professor like sharks when there’s blood in the water. I can’t imagine he didn’t notice it right away.) Also legal pharmaceuticals for calming performance nerves are a lot easier to get today. In short, he probably gave that one inconsequential public-access interview on a particularly bad day. He probably had them every now and then, until he had a really bad day last Friday.

Today, a lot of publications published online eulogies. They focused on the brilliance of his work and his impact on literature, but refrained from speculating on the cause of death. When I look at news on the Internet I almost always read the comments, and sometimes, if it’s a piece on a topic I already know a lot about, the comments are all I read. The New York Times forums are my favorites. There are a few trolls here and there, but readers generally don’t overreact, and the editors step in if things turn ugly. The Times comments section after Michiko Kakutani’s discussion of Wallace's work shows a particular style of group grieving – people who knew him personally or through his work shared memories, and a few weighed in on depression and suicide (a sin or a sickness? Discuss.) Some posts cited mentions of depression in Wallace’s writing - for example, the bit about the urge to jump overboard in his Harper’s essay on cruise lines, or his essay on depressed people. Sarah Palin was mentioned several times. I’m not a genius, but I am a person who values thoughtfulness, and I have to agree with the readers who drew parallels between what she symbolizes and how people like us (here, I’m not talking about Wallace – I’m talking about snooty Eastern urban types – folks who read the New York Times arts section online) feel when she mocks “big fat resumes” and her supporters consider book-learnin’ a political liability. In the reader’s forum, one reader speculated on Wallace’s thoughts about “this country's response to Sarah Palin, the blatant reaffirmation of the strident anti-intellectualism that put us on the downward slope with our foreign relations, our economy and our future as a place where it can even be possible to be a reflective human being and be appreciated as such.” Another reader replied, “shame on you for the Palin jokes. Think of how his family feels.”

It’s not a joke. It might be a partisan attempt to hijack sorrow in order to promote a political goal, which is tasteless (and a well-worn political strategy), but it’s also a statement of fact. When that feeling of worthlessness descends, reading today’s political coverage doesn’t help. Is the candidacy of Sarah Palin sufficient cause to do myself in? Of course not. Is her ascendance depressing to people who think there’s more to foreign relations than guns and bluster? Well, yes. When I visited my nephew’s grammar school I was struck by all the “anti-bully” propaganda plastered all over the school. It shows up in my own child’s urban school materials too, but not half as much as it does in the Republican stronghold my nephews live in. Yet the swaggering, hard-nosed bully is what the Palin / McCain ticket glorifies (This is the sort of paradox that Harpers-type writers love to point up, and if I were half as talented as David Foster Wallace, I would have written an entire essay by now on that topic.) The Third Reich rose on a wave of shared resentment over the humiliations of Versailles and the economic traumas of the early thirties. People supported Hitler because he defended them against those who would denigrate German pride. They didn’t necessarily recognize him as a bully – he was their champion. The grievances expressed by supporters of Palin are not fake – they're as real as the hurt felt by middle-class Germans when their savings became worthless and Goebbels told them to blame the infiltration of Jews, communists, and intellectuals. Looking at Palin through that lens, it feels dangerous and outmoded to be a thinking person at this moment. Even if Wallace had no thoughts at all on the current situation as he took steps toward his own death, those of us who are trying to make sense of what causes such a smart and successful person to kill himself can’t help but consider it. On the other hand, maybe we just think too much.

STOP TELLING ME WHAT EVERYBODY'S EATING: A RANT ABOUT ALMOST NOTHING.

There is a limit to what we can, within reason, be expected to endure, and sometimes even the smallest thing can tick me off. At the risk of demonstrating myself to be a short-tempered coot, I demand that the New York Times writers stop talking about what they and their sources are eating.

What do I mean? Good question. My response: Frequently, in 'features' sections of the NYT, like the New York Times Magazine, the stories involve longer interviews with sources who play major roles in stories. As if to demonstrate that these are real people, doing real things, with whom the journalist ACTUALLY interacted, and also so as to fill space (part of what Kevin Barnhurst has called "The New Long Journalism"), we find journalists sharing all kinds of information concerning what their sources are eating, and where

Take the recent article about internet trolls, from The New York Times Magazine, August 3, where we are told:
"We ate muffins at Terra Bite, a coffee shop founded by a Google employee where customers pay whatever price they feel like."
"We walked on, to Starbucks. At the next table, middle-schoolers with punk-rock haircuts feasted noisily on energy drinks and whipped cream. Fortuny sipped a white-chocolate mocha."
"Fortuny calls himself “a normal person who does insane things on the Internet,” and the scene at dinner later on the first day we spent together was exceedingly normal, with Fortuny, his roommate Charles and his longtime friend Zach trading stories at a sushi restaurant nearby over sake and happy-hour gyoza."

This is an informative story about internet trolls, and I write not to discredit the journalist (Matthias Schwartz), but to say two things:

a) The fear was, for a long time, that stories in news outlets would get shorter and shorter, as a result of competition with television. The web (though not all other parts of the internet) has given journalism a much more expansive shell for journalism, and stories are, in some cases, free to 'breathe', even to lounge around, have brunch, take a stroll through a leafy neighborhood, get lost in the basement of a bookstore, and eventually find their way home. In elite US journalism, we're seeing (and this is indirectly related to web journalism) long stories.

b) I think the bit where journalists tell us what they're eating, or what their sources are eating is irritating, and will be mocked in future times as a telltale sign of elite journalism of our current period. It's an obvious way to identify one's journalism as made by, and intended for, the upper middle-class (perhaps as 'objectivity' was a hundred years ago). And it's too clever by half.

Before I become Andy Rooney, I'm going to take my leave...

Don't Hate Him Because He's Intelligent

There are all sorts of reasons that I could give as to why I think John Derbyshire has surpassed Gore Vidal and Ron Rosenbaum as the biggest asshole now working in American journalism, but I would suggest that this recent piece of his in the National Review serve as Exhibit A. At the top of the article, he cites a recent essay by William Deresiewicz in which Deresiewicz recounts having had some trouble talking to his plumber. This inability to communicate across class levels becomes, for Derbyshire, an anecdote supporting the idea of a natural elite, based mostly, he seems to think, on intelligence. So you see, when the hoi polloi start moaning about elitism, it's really just a complaint that some folks are smarter than them.

First of all, any time you start talking about "inherited" intelligence you beg all kinds of pretty basic questions: including, what intelligence really is, how we know we have measured it, how we could ever control for various environmental influences with any degree of influence to make any sort of claim about innate abilities, and whether it is the case that intellectual skills are represented by a single trait, or (more likely by far) that some people have mental capabilities that make them good for dealing with some sorts of tasks, and others have capabilities to deal with other sorts of tasks.

But the really rich irony here is that Derbyshire has completely misunderstood (or mis-represented) the essay that he quotes from. William Deresiewicz isn't arguing that he can't talk to the plumber because he, Deresiewicz, is just so damned smart. He's arguing that he can't talk to him because he is not competent to do so. There's no natural hierarchy at play here; there's a failure of the educational system. Which any reasonably intelligent reader might have guessed from the title of the essay: "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education."

One of the ways that Ivy League schools deform their students, Deresiewicz argues, is by pampering them both intellectually and emotionally, so that they get an undeserved sense of superiority:

"There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances...Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls 'entitled mediocrity.'"

In other words, John Derbyshire, unafraid to speak the Truth that all us cowed liberals cannot accept--that there are truly superior people in the world, who are just more intellectually gifted than all the rest--isn't even bright enough to figure out the point of the stuff that he quotes. He has taken almost the exact opposite meaning from Deresiewicz's essay than the one the author obviously intended it to have. And then he's broadcast that perverted interpretation to his readers, most of whom probably won't probably bother to read the original. So now, an insightful, provocative commentary on the relationship between education and class in modern America gets turned into some lame defense of elitism, thanks to Derbyshire. What a tool.

This isn't really media commentary, but I had to get it off my chest.

Media and bodies

The issue of visibility is, as Dave notes, important for thinking about new media in general and especially thinking about it historically. Bloggers have helped make visible certain moments or kinds of information (two prominent examples: Presidential sexual follies; racist remarks made by public figures) that may not have become part of the public discussion in an earlier era. In doing so, they have also made visible the ways in which mainstream media had always decided on what was or was not newsworthy, allowing for a more public critique of news institutions as well as politicians.

At the same time (as Fernando points out) we need to realize that media of any kind both open up and foreclose certain opportunities, encourage certain ways of acting and discourage others, bring some kinds of information to the fore and hide other kinds. One of the things that the Internet hides is the physical specificity of the bodies that use it: their visibility. Sherry Turkle has famously celebrated that aspect of Internet communication. By removing physical presence from an interaction, people were allowed to be whoever they wanted to be. If you a middle-aged male accountant from Wichita, you could pretend to be a surfer, or a biker, or a Buddhist monk, or a woman, or a space alien. No-one would be the wiser: a kind of postmodernist play of identity became a very real possibility. But this feature also meant that it was easy to forget that most of the people using the Internet in the 1990s (the VAST, VAST majority) were white, youngish, middle-class American males (which might help explain why, for example, the dominant political ethos was essentially libertarian). When we look at how the Net was organized, the ways it was used, the kind of discourse that built up around it, we need to keep in mind what sorts of bodies were in charge, and maybe also look at how they used something like a notion of visibility (or related terms like “openness”), to both publicly present themselves and to strategically hide certain elements of their lives.

HEADFIRST INTO A DILEMMA: HISTORIOGRAPHY, CONTINUED

In a recent post, I argued that too many histories of the media focus too much on the discourse surrounding the media, and neglect the material qualities of the media themselves. I maintain this position, but in the last few weeks, I've been thinking about how some of the best historical work in media studies has succeeded largely because they de-center the object of analysis. In other words, much as works of history of communication technology that focus almost exclusively on, say, newspaper reports about a certain medium (many inspired by Carolyn Marvin's When Old Technologies Were New, a truly superior work) fail to deliver much because of their tendency to recapitulate tired ideas about utopian and dystopian expectations (Marvin, and Carey before her, always did better than this), histories that focus almost exclusively on the technology as a thing in and of itself reify the 'set-aside-ness' of the communication technology in question, and this leaves us with some pretty weak historical work, too.

A colleague recently suggested to me that Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought--a history of the U.S. from 1815 to 1848--did a better job with the history of the telegraph than many other books that took a more telegraph-centric look at things. The point: Howe (a bona fide historian) does better talking about the telegraph because he's not talking about the telegraph itself, or even about the discursive domain surrounding the telegraph. It's a superior piece of media history because it's not trying to be the history of a medium, which allows it to be a multivariate and broad exploration of all kinds of things happening in the U.S. as the electrical telegraph was coming into being (keeping in mind that the original 'telegraph' wasn't electrical, or American). So, all those issues in economics, culture, military history, race, gender, class, politics, power, regionalism, and literature get pulled into the analysis.

So, maybe it works like this:
--histories about technologies themselves are often too limited in scope
--histories about the discourse around the technologies have become a kind of one-note reminder of the constructedness of all things (an idea that is important, but not really sufficient in all cases to explore or exhaust a particular area of study)
--histories that go broad and don't focus on a communication technology are the best

To write good histories of the media, maybe we need to stop looking at the media.

The Internet: Technological Revolution or Business as Usual?

The other day while I was waging a pitched battle with my five year old son over something that seemed crucial at the time but is totally unmemorable now, my eight year old daughter came careening up with a copy of Entertainment Weekly, the issue with the “Comic-Con ’08 Preview.” She held up the page with the panels from Ender’s Game and asked in a tremulous voice, “What is happening?” Since I’m a certified media studies person sensitive to issues of kids and media, of course I turned on a dime, forgot about my fight with Wyatt, and settled in on the sofa for a nice snuggly media literacy session. Right? Wrong. In my frantic state, I flung my hands in the air (like I just don’t care) and said “I don’t know! I can’t tell you! I just don’t know!” And then, I barked, “And that’s a grown up magazine anyway, you shouldn’t be reading it!” End scene.

The next day she and I were in the Video Library rental place. I was trying to find a copy of Eastern Promises and she was lurking around in the comics section. I’m not that up on recent graphic novels but I’ve seen a few in the past that freaked me out. So I kept throwing glances over there and worrying that she would come across something horrible, but at the same time I was feeling ashamed of my censorship cop behavior and wanted to give her some freedom. She’s a sensitive person – she came home from Wall-E in tears – so part of why I reacted so inappropriately to the Ender’s Game question came of frustration at the futility of trying to protect her from weirdness. But at the same time she heads for the comics like a moth to the flame and has to be pried loose, so why should I hold her back from her appreciation of art? This was my internal struggle, but luckily she stayed near the kids’ shelf and all was well.

On our way home, I tried to do the right thing and address what happened with the Entertainment Weekly magazine. I told her I was sorry I was so abrupt and dismissive, and then I tried to explain what was happening in the panels – basically a boy was having a microchip removed from the back of his neck, and part of the whole alien mythology (myths are stories we tell that express our hopes and fears) is that people get abducted by aliens and get chips in their necks, so the aliens could monitor us, kind of like what we do to migratory animals, and this story looked like a play on that, and blah blah blah … the usual kind of over-explanation that makes her glaze over … finally she interrupts me and asks, but why does he seem so CALM about it?

I guess, because of Novocaine. What’s novocaine? It’s a drug doctors use to numb your skin so surgery doesn’t hurt. Oh. And that was the end of the conversation. Apparently she wasn’t too worried about the alien chips aspect of the thing.

So what’s my point in posting this evidence of my poor parenting skills? Just this: I think another reason why I tack back and forth between “The impact of the Internet is immeasurable!” and “Eh, there’s nothing new under the sun,” is because as far as the mundane details of my life are concerned, hardly anything troublesome comes of the Internet. It’s incredibly easy to monitor. We rigged it so she can’t go anywhere we haven’t already vetted. On the other hand, just about everything I have trouble handling, in terms of assessing its “effects” on my child, comes from print and television, and it’s usually stuff that I brought into the house! I have trouble handling the idea that my darling sunshiny innocent daughter will encounter a world of perversion and darkness. Putting her on the PBSKids website is probably one of the “safest” things I can do with her – it’s a better electronic babysitter than the tube ever was. It’s like a padded-wall playpen in the middle of a madhouse, but it's probably too young for her now and I have to let her grow up. This is a question of boundaries and barriers, and what audience I’m locating my kids in. Also, regarding Fernando's observations about Radway and Callejo: I'm not "using" media properly, if that means taking advantage of its complexities and using it to the utmost (and taking advantage of the teaching moments it provides). I'm far more wary of "real" than virtual space when it comes to the absolutely most important things in my life.

All Over the Place

I have remained blog-silent for so long (actually, forever) that now I feel I’d like to say a lot, and I am afraid I am going to be “all over the place.” I’ll try to get to the point, and I will restrict my comments to the recent exchange between Mark and Dave (below)...

When I first read Mark’s post on the democratic potential of the Internet, it made me think not so much about whether the Internet is or not a revolutionary democratic medium, but about the frequency and use of this type of discussion (perhaps Dave would call this a meta-level thought). No doubt, that thought was prompted by the fact that I was also reading at that time two texts that I use in class. One was the concluding chapter to Janice Radway’s “Reading the Romance.” The other, a portion of Javier Callejo’s “La Audiencia Activa” (probably the best piece of audience research ever produced in Spain).

Radway devotes a significant part of her conclusions to discussing whether or not reading romance novels has any practical utility for improving the social and family situation of women. Callejo, in turn, discusses how participants in the focus groups he conducted often accused other members of the family (usually those in less “powerful” positions) of being addicted to television (constantly watching useless programs, not doing anything worthwhile with their time, etc). Radway is speaking from what seems by all accounts a genuine concern for the well-being of women, while Callejo’s subjects seem to be using television to play power games within the family. However, I feel that there is a line of continuity between Radway’s discussion and Callejo’s subjects’ comments. They are all talking about how we do not use the media properly or how we do not extract all the potential of those media to change our personal, family or social situation. They are all judging “others” in terms of their media use. I think that the issue of the democratic potential of the Internet (note that “democratic” is equivalent to “good”) belongs to the same kind of discourse. And I have to confess that I feel uncomfortable with it. The same way I don’t like it when people tell me some media is bad for me, I don’t like it when people say “it’s great, but people don’t use it properly or enough”.

Technology opens up possibilities (or closes them off). And the fact that those possibilities are allowed is precisely what leads to the discussions and debates mentioned above. If you only have a land line and you do not answer a call, the caller will probably assume that you are out. But if you have a cell phone and you don’t answer a call, the caller will probably feel you are not a good cell user (after all, cells only exist so you can answer calls at any time from anywhere). It is the possibilities that the technology opens that allows others to criticize, evaluate or ponder your behavior: are you a good reader, a good TV viewer, a good Wikipedia contributor, a good citizen? (I have to confess that ever since this blog was started I have felt the need to live up to the possibilities it opened to me, and I have been somewhat anxious about not living up to those possibilities… I am starting to feel more relaxed now).

And, when the technology increases our possibilities to do things, can we say that something new is happening or is it just the same old? Well, I think the answer is rather arbitrary. If we define and name a certain animal in a certain way, and then we find a specimen that matches the description in every respect but one, we have two options: make our definition more complex to account for the observed variation or use a new name to refer to this specimen which is only slightly different. In my opinion, the name is not that relevant. What really matters is that we carefully study these animals and their behavior.

And this leads me to Dave’s latest post (which, by the way, reminded me of Dominique Wolton’s “Eloge du Grand Public”). I think what Dave is describing is a more complex world. While the audience is fragmenting, there are also certain events (contents, products?) able to attract unprecedentedly large audiences. Both things (fragmentation and agglutination) are taking place at the same time. And this is so because the technology is opening up possibilities and some people (not all, there are still too many lazy bums!) are taking advantage of some (not all, that would be impossible for anyone) possibilities. And that is enough to make our world much more complex and blur previously clear distinctions.

I don’t know if I made sense, but I feel better now :)