I find it impossible to write fiction thatâs set after 2002. [âŚ.] Itâs just that itâs inconceivable to depict contemporary times authentically without including interludes where characters stare at their cell phones instead of advancing their plotlines â their lives â towards some conclusion. Which is, as a thing to read, mind-numbingly dull. Unless I write âand then his Galaxy 4âs battery diedâ no one can ever get lost, forget an important fact, meet a partner outside of a dating site, or do anything that doesnât eventually have them picking up a phone. So Iâm stuck writing about an era where Ethan Hawke was considered the pinnacle of manliness. Is
âYour Phone Is Ruining You For Usâ - Robert Lanham, The Awl
It is just unbelievable how âold man yells at cloudâ neo-luddites come off when they go on rants about how technology is destroying everything interesting about humanity. I mean, leaving aside the bizarre circlejerk that is the second half of the article, which is its own trek into evidence-free weirdness, itâs just likeâŚhow much of a fucking dinosaur do you have to be to write paragraphs like this? And itâs not just this dude.Â
I mean, you canât throw a rock without you hitting some cranky middle-aged white-dude author whoâs been kind of successful (or really successful) for a while now going âKids these days with their Honeys Boo Boo and their feetball and their Pokemons and their cell phones and their utterly banal and uninteresting alienation that occurs even while theyâre simultaneously more connected than ever before.â
You, as a writer, honestly cannot come up with any way to either incorporate phones interestingly or a way to ignore them convincingly? None? To the point that youâre âstuckâ being unable to set your work past the â90s? You do realize that youâre self-identifying as less adaptable and clever than like 80% of sitcom writers in that case, yeah?
I mean, the only way you can come to the conclusion that this is just impossible to do is if you were either tragically unimaginative to begin with or if your refusal to engage with the technology is so complete that youâre left sincerely judging these things by their ad campaigns.Â
You donât want to engage with the technology? Fine. Leave it on the cutting-room floor. Nobody wants to read about somebody playing CandyCrush for half an hour on the subway if thatâs the only thing going on. (Other things nobody wants to read about: A character watching tv for half an hour, a character reading a book for half an hour, a character knitting for half an hour, a character spending half an hour doing nothing but plowing a fucking field, etc.) You canât come up with a way to make phone-use interesting and plot-advancing? Sorry, thatâs you sucking.
Technology isnât perfect. Technology isnât uniformly accessible. Technology is subject to user error, and outages, and sabotage, and theft.
[London tube announcement sign reading âFor the benefit of passengers using Apple iOS 6, local area maps are available from the booking office.â]
Yeah. GoogleMaps will quite frequently send you rabbiting through a loop of toll road for no reason, too. Or confidently insist that your new dentistâs office is in the middle of a highway, or that a patch of territory really belongs to the wrong country. GPS apps will cheerily direct you to make a left-hand turn where strictly prohibited, or instruct you to drive into the sea. You can absolutely get lost without your phone dying.
Careless accidents or casual misbehavior can take on horror-movie proportions given the right circumstances. Giving in to the temptation of a quick surreptitious Googling of your date or a new acquaintance while theyâre in the bathroom can cast a completely new light on things theyâve said and leave you spending the rest of the evening in a conversational Twilight Zone. An unlocked phone left unattended presents an opportunity for snooping previously unheard of without having access to someoneâs home. A lost or stolen phone presents the possibility of trouble in a similar proportion, only with added malicious intent and threats of damage. The immediacy of contact can be used to defuse or accelerate confrontations, or add new layers to previously-established inter-character tension.
As many interesting plot-device limitations as phones (theoretically) destroy, they provide that many more new opportunities. Or you just come up with new ways to retain the same limitations. When residential lines became the expectation, films started establishing that service was out, or the line was cut, or that the home didnât have one in order to explain why characters didnât just call somebody. Once candy-bar phones became de rigueur, stories started establishing that nobody had any bars. Smart phones are now sidelined by apps not working, or batteries being drained, or service being unavailable. Done and done. Hell, even in any area with perfect reception and functionality, emergency situations can still involve yelling at a 911 operator that youâre on the side of the fucking road being attacked by a fucking O-T-T-E-R, and no, you donât have a fucking address to give them.
If you donât want to bother with that, fine. If you prefer to write in a time when these things didnât have to be taken into account, thatâs fine, too. But donât sit there acting like it canât be done interestingly or intelligently or to the benefit of the plotline, if you care to take two seconds and consider how all that information, connection, and accessibility grits or greases the gears for your characters and your plots.
â Agreed. The only reason to complain about technology ruining storytelling is if you are copying old stories where a simple phone call would fix everything.
Put yourself out on the cutting edge where a simple phone call CANâT fix everything. Resist the impulse to create a circumstance that eliminates tech (such as, no oneâs phone works for X bullshit reason) and step into an undiscovered country of plot points NO ONE HAS THOUGHT OF YET.
I know this is a super long post and I hate to add to it but I agree and I also point out that people have been writing science fiction for decades that assume everything or many things that are now true of modern day. Instant communication, instant access to information, etc. And yet, miraculously, those stories managed to be written! Maybe they didnât predict that weâd like to check neko atsume every half hour given the chance. But they also did include limitations, interruptions, etc. that didnât happen to come true. Often in ways that are way more inconvenient than âugh why cant I turn off facebook alerts.â If people could write about basically the internet and cell phones before these things existed or while they were developing technologies, what paralyzes people from writing about them now?
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