• kottke.org, Tuesday, June 8, 2010 2:20 PM

How will the iPhone's new FaceTime videophone functionality fare among users? Not well, according to a close reading of David Foster Wallace's '96 novel "Infinite Jest." "Within the reality of the book, videophones enjoyed enormous initial popularity but then after a few months, most people gave it up," notes blogger Jason Kottke. The reasons? Emotional stress, physical vanity, and "a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech."

Regarding the stress part, Wallace wrote: "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 even close to complete attention to [the person]." Furthermore, "A traditional aural-only conversation [...] let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue." And, really, where would we be without the occasional highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue? No place. That's where.

Read the whole story at kottke.org »