IJ study archive

The 2004 diagnosis that deep single-object attention is dying under movies, TV, and the internet — EUP's attention…

echoes

From: DFW in conversation with David Kipen — City Arts & Lectures, San Francisco (June 17, 2004)

  • Early text: [scene] Wallace argues literary fiction is, like poetry, dying a little as a cultural force — demographically and commercially, not artistically — because screen media are changing how people apportion aesthetic attention; quiet-room immersion in one thing for a long time will become alien to nearly everyone without hard training; fewer people are interested each year [00:13:25–00:14:38]
  • IJ echo: EUP's television-attention argument and its IJ execution (e-unibus-pluram; the Entertainment as terminal attention capture)
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation