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self-conscious appearance of unself-consciousness is the real door to TV’s whole mirror-hall of illusions, and for us, the
     Audience, it is both medicine and poison.
    For we gaze at these rare, highly-trained, unwatched-seeming people for six hours daily. And we love these people. In terms
     of attributing to them true supernatural assets and desiring to emulate them, it’s fair to say we sort of worship them. In
     a real Joe Briefcase-world that shifts ever more starkly from some community of relationships to networks of strangers connected
     by self-interest and technology, the people we espy on TV offer us familiarity, community. Intimate friendship. But we split
     what we see. The characters may be our “close friends,” but the
performers
are beyond strangers: they’re imagos, demigods, and they move in a different sphere, hang out with and marry only each other,
     seem even as actors accessible to Audience only via the mediation of tabloid, talk show, EM signal. And yet both actors and
     characters, so terribly removed and filtered, seem so terribly, gloriously
natural
when we watch.
    Given how much we watch and what watching means, it’s inevitable, for those of us fictionists or Joe Briefcases who fancy
     ourselves voyeurs, to get the idea that these persons behind the glass—persons who are often the most colorful, attractive,
     animated,
alive
people in our daily experience—are also people who are oblivious to the fact that they are watched. This illusion is toxic.
     It’s toxic for lonely people because it sets up an alienating cycle (viz. “Why can’t
I
be like that?” etc.), and it’s toxic for writers because it leads us to confuse actual fiction-research with a weird kind
     of fiction-
consumption
. Self-conscious people’s oversensitivity to real humans tends to put us before the television and its one-way window in an
     attitude of relaxed and total reception, rapt. We watch various actors play various characters, etc. For 360 minutes per diem,
     we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant quality of truly alive persons is watchableness,
     and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but
rooted in
the phenomenon of watching. Plus the idea that the single biggest part of real watchableness is seeming to be unaware that
     there’s any watching going on. Acting natural. The persons we young fiction writers and assorted shut-ins study, feel for,
     feel through most intently are, by virtue of a genius for feigned unself-consciousness, fit to stand people’s gazes. And we,
     trying desperately to be nonchalant, perspire creepily on the subway.
     
    a supposedly fun thing i’ll never do again
     
    also by David Foster Wallace
    The Broom of the System
    Girl with Curious Hair
    Infinite Jest
     
    David Foster Wallace
    a supposedly fun thing i’ll never do again
    essays and arguments

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    To Colin Harrison and Michael Pietsch
     
    Copyright © 1997 by David Foster Wallace
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    The following essays have appeared previously (in somewhat different [and sometimes way shorter] forms):
    “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” “Getting Away from Pretty Much Being Away from It All,” and “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll
     Never Do Again” in
Harper’s
in 1992, 1994, and 1996 under the respective titles “Tennis, Trigonometry,