I'm very open to the possibility that in that specific way that isolation uh of that the TV can bring by by full by energy even but by entertaining you for that many hours it might prevent you from actually going out and like meeting up with people. I want to resist a little bit like lumping them all together and I'm gonna appeal well I wasn't lumped them all together okay I was just saying that we might have might have similar said still might have the same effect that on you that it does on jokeYeah to watch as the low the lower raspa yeah it's already kind of arrogant to be to be categorizing low and highbrow but I'm gonna keep doing it
We dive into David Foster Wallace’s sprawling 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” How do TV and new forms of media keep their hold on us when we know at some level that they’re reinforcing our loneliness and passivity? That’s easy, Wallace says, post-modern cool. Flatter me, let me think we’re all in the joke together, give me “an ironic permission-slip to do what I do best whenever I feel confused and guilty: assume, inside, a sort of fetal position, a pose of passive reception to comfort, escape, reassurance.” But in the years since this essay, the TV landscape has completely transformed. Has it transcended its function as a surrogate companion for lonely people, or has it just found new ways to keep us isolated and passive?
Plus, we talk about the recent new SPSP guidelines and Jon Haidt’s recent essay on why he’s resigning from the organization. (Sorry, Jon!)
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