Worth reading together. This 1993 DFW essay E Unibas Pluram on how TV is not really the voyeurism that fiction writing needs
jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf
And this 2021 essay on “surveillance fiction” about how Cat Person came out of social media voyeurism
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Interesting that DFW write this in 1993 just before reality tv took off with real world and then offed himself in 2008 just on the cusp of social media emerging… and was presciently obsessed with exactly the dynamics that came after
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I think I glanced at this DFW essay a long time ago, but didn’t finish it (it’s 44 dense pages). Reads at once prescient, dated, and curiously blind to itself.
It’s basically “TV is eating the world” circa 1993.
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