What's missing here?

The section beginning on page 144, in which Wallace outlines the rapid rise and fall of "videophony"¹ in the Jest's near-future culture, is one of the funniest and most memorable of the novel's non-plot passages. It could have been inserted just about anywhere in the novel, and is clearly the product of (a stoned?) Wallace rambling away and amusing himself.

Wallace was quite wrong in his prediction, of course. Video communication is already available in the latest portable communications devices, both mobile phones and tablet computers, and will probably be quite commonplace for everyday conversations by the end of this decade. As for the whole riff about personal vanity creating a new market niche which eventually undoes the parent product, he's wrong for a reason none of us could have possibly predicted: the decline of privacy. The age of social networking and online video has eroded our modesty and self-consciousness about our public image and reputation to a degree that would have seemed jaw-dropping around the time that Wallace was writing the Jest. In particular, the generation just now becoming adults seem to have accepted the occasional embarrassing online photo of one without clothes, doing a kegstand², or doing a kegstand without clothes, as a harmless coming-of-age rite. The embarrassment passes quickly and, despite the efforts of older generations to get them to understand that these photos, once released into the wilds of the Internet, will never go away ever, today's youth figure the memory will fade along with the attendant social uproar.

But it's the fact that in the Jest these video communications are conducted from home, through the household entertainment centre (the "teleputer"), that, to me, constitutes another, related incorrect prediction: how did Wallace whif so completely on foreseeing the ubiquity of cellphones? The first digital "2G" portable communications networks were unveiled in 1991, and from there the spread of cellphones has been quite rapid. They were nowhere near saturation point by the time the book was published, but anyone with his ear to the ground consumer-technology-wise could probably have figured out by, say, 1994 that these things would be everywhere within a decade or two. Why does no one in the Jest have a cellphone?³

The most likely explanation is simply that Wallace was a bit of a Luddite; in the introduction to the original electronic edition of his long-form essay on John McCain's 2000 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination (then titled Up, Simba!), he claims to have no idea how an e-book works and, further, to have little knowledge of the advanced functions of contemporary personal computing technology. Surely he was the last kid on his block to own a cellphone, but doesn't it seem like just the sort of thing he would see coming and wish to grumble about?

1. Interesting to note that the etymology of this word makes it completely wrong. As the word "telephone" is derived from the Greek words for "distant" and "sound", the technology described should rightly be called "televideo". "Videophone" should mean something like "image-sound", and could just as easliy be another name for pretty much any video playback device. Surprising that a language-obsessive like Wallace didn't catch that. [Return]


2. By the way, when was the last time any of you did a kegstand? Mine was this past May. I was, at the time, a 35-year-old father of two. Thank you very much, you're only as old as you feel, etc etc. [Return]


3. Actually, I can't remember whether or not Hugh Steeply has one, he may very well. Still, the top-secret government agent having one as part of his arsenal of high-tech spy gear would just further underscore my point, n'est-ce pas? [Return]