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How Is Irony Affecting Society?

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How is Irony Affecting Society?
In 1993, David Foster Wallace wrote his essay “E Unibus Pluram”, which addressed the way irony had been incorporated into different types of media within the 20th century. Focusing on two main elements, he starts out by exploring how irony is used in television and then moves on to explore the way irony is used in literary fiction. While he was researching, Wallace found out that the average American household watched about six hours of television every day (Wallace 151).Though today, the average American household only watches about five hours of television every day. The decrease in hours is thought to come as a direct result of the usage of smart phones or other streaming devices and websites (Hinckley). Throughout “E Unibus Pluram”, Wallace brings up the point that as a society, we love the characters and often build a relationship with them. However, the actors who play those characters are strangers to us and those who portray those characters are strangers to our lives and could not be farther than the ‘friends’ we make on the television screen (Wallace 154). This can be understandable as we know that television is false therefore the characters on the screen are also false, but how can we create a friendship with something that is only part of reality during the hour of on air time that it has? It is true that most characters that are written for television are marketed towards the audience of the show, but even though those characters

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