Infinite Jest (30 page)

Even worse, of course, was the traumatic expulsion-from-Eden feeling of looking up
from tracing your thumb’s outline on the Reminder Pad or adjusting the old Unit’s
angle of repose in your shorts and actually seeing your videophonic interfacee idly
strip a shoelace of its gumlet as she talked to you, and suddenly realizing your whole
infantile fantasy of commanding your partner’s attention while you yourself got to
fugue-doodle and make little genital-adjustments was deluded and insupportable and
that you were actually commanding not one bit more attention than you were paying,
here. The whole attention business was monstrously stressful, video callers found.

(2) And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you
worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside
who doesn’t. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee,
surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your
saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no such answer-as-you-are
informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were
less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having
to throw on clothes and attach prostheses and do hair-checks in the foyer mirror before
answering the door.

But the real coffin-nail for videophony involved the way callers’ faces looked on
their TP screen, during calls. Not their callers’ faces, but their own, when they
saw them on video. It was a three-button affair, after all, to use the TP’s cartridge-card’s
Video-Record option to record both pulses in a two-way visual call and play the call
back and see how your face had actually looked to the other person during the call.
This sort of appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience
proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces
appeared on a TP screen. It wasn’t just ‘Anchorman’s Bloat,’ that well-known impression
of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end
TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and
moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid
indefiniteness
that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy,
unlikable.
In an early and ominous InterLace/G.T.E. focus-group survey that was all but ignored
in a storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm, almost 60% of respondents who
received visual access to their own faces during videophonic calls specifically used
the terms
untrustworthy
,
unlikable
, or
hard to like
in describing their own visage’s appearance, with a phenomenally ominous 71% of senior-citizen
respondents specifically comparing their video-faces to that of Richard Nixon during
the Nixon-Kennedy debates of B.S. 1960.

The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry’s psychological consultants
termed
Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria
(or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking; and in fact it was
those entrepreneurs who gravitated toward the production of high-definition videophonic
imaging and then outright masks who got in and out of the short-lived videophonic
era with their shirts plus solid additional nets.

Mask-wise, the initial option of High-Definition Photographic Imaging—i.e. taking
the most flattering elements of a variety of flattering multi-angle photos of a given
phone-consumer and—thanks to existing image-configuration equipment already pioneered
by the cosmetics and law-enforcement industries—combining them into a wildly attractive
high-def broadcastable composite of a face wearing an earnest, slightly overintense
expression of complete attention—was quickly supplanted by the more inexpensive and
byte-economical option of (using the exact same cosmetic-and-FBI software) actually
casting the enhanced facial image in a form-fitting polybutylene-resin mask, and consumers
soon found that the high up-front cost of a permanent wearable mask was more than
worth it, considering the stress- and
VPD
-reduction benefits, and the convenient Velcro straps for the back of the mask and
caller’s head cost peanuts; and for a couple fiscal quarters phone/cable companies
were able to rally
VPD
-afflicted consumers’ confidence by working out a horizontally integrated deal where
free composite-and-masking services came with a videophone hookup. The high-def masks,
when not in use, simply hung on a small hook on the side of a TP’s phone-console,
admittedly looking maybe a bit surreal and discomfiting when detached and hanging
there empty and wrinkled, and sometimes there were potentially awkward mistaken-identity
snafus involving multi-user family or company phones and the hurried selection and
attachment of the wrong mask taken from some long row of empty hanging masks—but all
in all the masks seemed initially like a viable industry response to the vanity,-stress,-and-Nixonian-facial-image
problem.

(2 and maybe also 3) But combine the natural entrepreneurial instinct to satisfy
all
sufficiently high consumer demand, on the one hand, with what appears to be an almost
equally natural distortion in the way persons tend to see themselves, and it becomes
possible to account historically for the speed with which the whole high-def-videophonic-mask
thing spiralled totally out of control. Not only is it weirdly hard to evaluate what
you yourself look like, like whether you’re good-looking or not—e.g. try looking in
the mirror and determining where you stand in the attractiveness-hierarchy with anything
like the objective ease you can determine whether just about anyone else you know
is good-looking or not—but it turned out that consumers’ instinctively skewed self-perception,
plus vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and then outright demanding
videophone masks that were really quite a lot better-looking than they themselves
were in person. High-def mask-entrepreneurs ready and willing to supply not just verisimilitude
but aesthetic enhancement—stronger chins, smaller eye-bags, air-brushed scars and
wrinkles—soon pushed the original mimetic-mask-entrepreneurs right out of the market.
In a gradually unsubtlizing progression, within a couple more sales-quarters most
consumers were now using masks so undeniably better-looking on videophones than their
real faces were in person, transmitting to one another such horrendously skewed and
enhanced masked images of themselves, that enormous psychosocial stress began to result,
large numbers of phone-users suddenly reluctant to leave home and interface personally
with people who, they feared, were now habituated to seeing their far-better-looking
masked selves on the phone and would on seeing them in person suffer (so went the
callers’ phobia) the same illusion-shattering aesthetic disappointment that, e.g.,
certain women who always wear makeup give people the first time they ever see them
without makeup.

The social anxieties surrounding the phenomenon psych-consultants termed
Optimistically Misrepresentational Masking
(or
OMM
) intensified steadily as the tiny crude first-generation videophone cameras’ technology
improved to where the aperture wasn’t as narrow, and now the higher-end tiny cameras
could countenance and transmit more or less full-body images. Certain psychologically
unscrupulous entrepreneurs began marketing full-body polybutylene and -urethane 2-D
cutouts—sort of like the headless muscleman and bathing-beauty cutouts you could stand
behind and position your chin on the cardboard neck-stump of for cheap photos at the
beach, only these full-body videophone-masks were vastly more high-tech and convincing-looking.
Once you added variable 2-D wardrobe, hair- and eye-color options, various aesthetic
enlargements and reductions, etc., costs started to press the envelope of mass-market
affordability, even though there was at the same time horrific social pressure to
be able to afford the very best possible masked 2-D body-image, to keep from feeling
comparatively hideous-looking on the phone. How long, then, could one expect it to
have been before the relentless entrepreneurial drive toward an ever-better mousetrap
conceived of the
Transmittable Tableau
(a.k.a.
TT
), which in retrospect was probably the really sharp business-end of the videophonic
coffin-nail. With
TT
s, facial and bodily masking could now be dispensed with altogether and replaced with
the video-transmitted image of what was essentially a heavily doctored still-photograph,
one of an incredibly fit and attractive and well-turned-out human being, someone who
actually resembled you the caller only in such limited respects as like race and limb-number,
the photo’s face focused attentively in the direction of the videophonic camera from
amid the sumptuous but not ostentatious appointments of the sort of room that best
reflected the image of yourself you wanted to transmit, etc.

The Tableaux were simply high-quality transmission-ready photographs, scaled down
to diorama-like proportions and fitted with a plastic holder over the videophone camera,
not unlike a lens-cap. Extremely good-looking but not terrifically successful entertainment-celebrities—the
same sort who in decades past would have swelled the cast-lists of infomercials—found
themselves in demand as models for various high-end videophone Tableaux.

Because they involved simple transmission-ready photography instead of computer imaging
and enhancement, the Tableaux could be mass-produced and commensurately priced, and
for a brief time they helped ease the tension between the high cost of enhanced body-masking
and the monstrous aesthetic pressures videophony exerted on callers, not to mention
also providing employment for set-designers, photographers, airbrushers, and infomercial-level
celebrities hard-pressed by the declining fortunes of broadcast television advertising.

(3) But there’s some sort of revealing lesson here in the beyond-short-term viability-curve
of advances in consumer technology. The career of videophony conforms neatly to this
curve’s classically annular shape: First there’s some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like
advance in consumer tech—like from aural to video phoning—which advance always, however,
has certain unforeseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then but the market-niches
created by those disadvantages—like people’s stressfully vain repulsion at their own
videophonic appearance—are ingeniously filled via sheer entrepreneurial verve; and
yet the very advantages of these ingenious disadvantage-compensations seem all too
often to undercut the original high-tech advance, resulting in consumer-recidivism
and curve-closure and massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors. In the present
case, the stress-and-vanity-compensations’ own evolution saw video-callers rejecting
first their own faces and then even their own heavily masked and enhanced physical
likenesses and finally covering the video-cameras altogether and transmitting attractively
stylized static Tableaux to one another’s TPs. And, behind these lens-cap dioramas
and transmitted Tableaux, callers of course found that they were once again stresslessly
invisible, unvainly makeup- and toupeeless and baggy-eyed behind their celebrity-dioramas,
once again free—since once again unseen—to doodle, blemish-scan, manicure, crease-check—while
on their screen, the attractive, intensely attentive face of the well-appointed celebrity
on the other end’s Tableau reassured them that they were the objects of a concentrated
attention they themselves didn’t have to exert.

And of course but these advantages were nothing other than the once-lost and now-appreciated
advantages of good old Bell-era blind aural-only telephoning, with its 6 and (6
²
) pinholes. The only difference was that now these expensive silly unreal stylized
Tableaux were being transmitted between TPs on high-priced video-fiber lines. How
much time, after this realization sank in and spread among consumers (mostly via phone,
interestingly), would any micro-econometrist expect to need to pass before high-tech
visual videophony was mostly abandoned, then, a return to good old telephoning not
only dictated by common consumer sense but actually after a while culturally approved
as a kind of chic integrity, not Ludditism but a kind of retrograde transcendence
of sci-fi-ish high-tech for its own sake, a transcendence of the vanity and the slavery
to high-tech fashion that people view as so unattractive in one another. In other
words a return to aural-only telephony became, at the closed curve’s end, a kind of
status-symbol of anti-vanity, such that only callers utterly lacking in self-awareness
continued to use videophony and Tableaux, to say nothing of masks, and these tacky
facsimile-using people became ironic cultural symbols of tacky vain slavery to corporate
PR and high-tech novelty, became the Subsidized Era’s tacky equivalents of people
with leisure suits, black velvet paintings, sweater-vests for their poodles, electric
zirconium jewelry, NoCoat LinguaScrapers, and c. Most communications consumers put
their Tableaux-dioramas at the back of a knick-knack shelf and covered their cameras
with standard black lens-caps and now used their phone consoles’ little mask-hooks
to hang these new little plasticene address-and-phone diaries specially made with
a little receptacle at the top of the binding for convenient hanging from former mask-hooks.
Even then, of course, the bulk of U.S. consumers remained verifiably reluctant to
leave home and teleputer and to interface personally, though this phenomenon’s endurance
can’t be attributed to the videophony-fad per se, and anyway the new panagoraphobia
served to open huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets for home-shopping and
-delivery, and didn’t cause much industry concern.