Cold vs. warm media — commercial entertainment as a contemptuous economic transaction, art as gift — E Unibus…
echoes
From: Bookworm phone follow-up — DFW by phone from his home in Illinois (KCRW, August 3, 2000)
- Early text:
[scene] Wallace argues that TV, commercial film, and
top-40 music are very cold media: none of it is for you; it exists to make
you like it so rewards accrue to producers and sponsors [01:46:05–01:48:09];
the facile and corporate carries a cool contempt for the audience, a low
estimation of its willingness to do work or withstand discomfort
[01:52:45]; warm counter-examples are alternative music, poetry slams, and
makeshift park art, where the transaction is between people and economics
is not at the fundament [01:48:09–01:49:03]
- IJ echo: the Entertainment's lethality as commercial spectation carried
to its asymptote — the same lethality reading EUP develops as
malignant-TV economics; the gift/economic distinction also maps onto the
novel's gift structures (AA sponsorship as non-economic transmission)
- Weight: shared-preoccupation