Thoughts on 'E Unibus Pluram'

E Unibus Pluram is David Foster Wallace’s prophetic account of TV and its effects on US fiction and society. Though it was written in the early 90s, its arguments are pertinent to TV and social media today.

The essay argues that:

• fiction and society are moulded by the average household’s consumption of six hours of TV per day;
• among the most desirable characteristics of a person is their oxymoronic ability to ‘act natural’ and be physically attractive;
• the solution to viewers being able to skip adverts by changing channel or recording programmes is to make adverts look more like programmes and make programmes more like adverts (overt: product placement; covert: projection of a certain lifestyle e.g. Made In Chelsea);
• its use of irony and satire of itself has made TV beyond reproach (e.g. Saturday Night Live);
• cool indifference to life is a product of TV. We are trained “to see real-life personal up-close stuff the same way we relate to the distant and exotic”.

The essay mentions a theorised ‘Telecomputer’ (TC) which grants the viewer the ability to produce any visual imagery they want, to “engineer our own dreams”. The original argument is this democratises television by empowering the viewer. DFW argues the opposite: more choice leads to “a more powerful enhancer and enabler of fantasy” and thus a greater addiction.

The Internet seems to have played both these roles. Initially, it was a democratising force for open, individual, independent but interconnected websites. But now the Internet is made of social media Megacities: Facebook, Snapchat etc. which eat the rest of the Internet and produce their own walled-garden upside-down reflections of it.

This is the new TV. Websites which extrude infinite supplies of novelty nuggets. Websites where advert is disguised as content (“three of your friends like Coca Cola”). Websites whose content is self-creating (so has a production cost of 0) but is more personal (so is more addictive). And, like TV before it, it is impervious to criticism: any dissenting content can be blocked, hidden, dismissed as the ramblings of a moron or ignored as a tired meme.

E Unibus Pluram is the second DFW piece I have read (after This Is Water), and found it challenging. It is worth reading and thinking deeply about (in particular, the ideas applied to the social media, to the recent rise of populism, or the postmodern pantomime politics of Trump or Surkov). Though the writing is extraordinary, 20,000 words makes for a long and dense essay — have a dictionary handy.