David Foster Wallace was right – even in paradise we will need the internet | Brigid Delaney
There was one thing he didn’t predict: that when entertainment and addiction met in the internet, rage and hate would follow
What did the internet look like in 1996? It was both basic and chaotic – message boards and some forums. Few people had email. You had to dial up with a modem. There was no social media – no Facebook or Twitter or Wikipedia.
According to Slate, in 1996 Americans with the internet spent less than 30 minutes a month on it. It was just too slow – and anyway, it tied up the phone line.
That year, the writer David Foster Wallace was winding up a national book tour for his door-stopper Infinite Jest. He was 34 and the book was his generation’s Ulysses (or Finnegans Wake
