Why should authors not embrace the networked world?
March 29, 2015 5:09 PM   Subscribe

"It’s hard not to hear cultural ruin, melodramatic as that may be, in every interrupting chirp and chime of a phone receiving a text or a call or blasting a video through its speakers on a packed subway train. The citizen in me, greedy for chances at quiet reflection and, frankly, to be left in peace from unwelcome noises, shudders and laments. But the artist in me, the writer, asks a more probing question, if not necessarily more optimistic: what might I do with all this?" Novelist Steve Himmer explores how to write about our increasingly interconnected world in "Reader, I Muted Him: The Narrative Possibilities of Networked Life."
posted by ocherdraco (14 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
I don't have a problem incorporating it in my work. It gets me to thinking differently: in one story, the smartphone helps the heroine let a rescue group know on another continent, what a potential kidnap victim looks like and they could show their results immediately. In another short story series, a sixtysomething female assassin relies on her smartphone to do her work.
It also gives me a chance to show the shortcomings of the technology as well as push me away from old stirytelling conventions: a good storyteller is not impeded: there is always ways to weave a story, no matter what you have to work with...
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 6:38 PM on March 29, 2015 [1 favorite]


That Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan movie did this really well...
posted by Nevin at 7:24 PM on March 29, 2015


How different would Jane Eyre have been if Jane's relatives could have reached her by telephone? What about novels which rely on mistaken identity and which could have been avoided with affordable photographs? Literature didn't stop with the invention of the telephone, or the camera, or the automobile or the train-- in the sense the article is talking about distance has been eroding since we've had history.

Why do we always feel as though the change happening in our lifetime is really the crucial one?
posted by frumiousb at 7:47 PM on March 29, 2015 [6 favorites]


How different would Jane Eyre have been if Jane's relatives could have reached her by telephone?

Jane's Aunt Reed told her Eyre uncle that she had died, in order to prevent her being rescued/inheriting. Unless narratively he had a reason to doubt her and check for himself, that could plausibly happen in the modern world.

But it's a thoroughly 19th-century novel in many ways, so updating it would require changing a lot of plot points. If you made Jane an illegal immigrant, for example, or set her story in a non-Western country, you could do a lot with lost identity, being an orphan, etc.
posted by emjaybee at 8:05 PM on March 29, 2015


I was thinking of the later moment where Jane has written them to tell them she is alive, but has to flee in the wake of the disaster marriage and does not know they are looking for her. (Or that it was her uncle who sent Bertha's brother to stop the wedding.) But yes.
posted by frumiousb at 8:18 PM on March 29, 2015


This is a problem DMs face in modern-day settings of pen-and-paper RPG campaigns too.
posted by reiichiroh at 8:40 PM on March 29, 2015 [4 favorites]


From the article: "And, the more we expect to always have a signal, the harder it is to conceive a convincing situation in which a character does not, as a popular supercut of horror film moments makes clear."

Hell, I just had three days with no signal. I was sitting in the middle of about 80,000 people attending the Emerald City Comic-Con and could only get one bar out of five - not enough to get a reliable data connection to use my credit-card reader. It was a mix of the huge number of people wandering around sharing photos of the costumes (my favorite: the Scarlet Witch crossplay, yum yum) and the huge steel cage that makes up part of the building creating a few huge dead spots. And this was right in the middle of downtown Seattle.

And then of course there is "going underground". No signal there unless someone's installed cell repeaters in the subway tunnels.

It's pretty easy to have no reception right in the middle of the city.
posted by egypturnash at 8:47 PM on March 29, 2015 [2 favorites]


This is a problem DMs face in modern-day settings of pen-and-paper RPG campaigns too.


I've seen this sentiment expressed, but that seems really weird to me. One of the biggest problems GMs face is the "splitting of the team" element. With decent networking, one can split the party as much as needed, and still keep them in contact. Also, one of the big problems in games is feeding information to the players. Properly networked, they can be fed as much information and misinformation as needed. Admittedly, it can require a mental flip to go from "Hide information from the players" to "give them more information than they need"...

Summoning help isn't much of a problem either, despite what GMs have said. They may be able to get in touch with the police, but that doesn't mean they'll be believed or that help is going to arrive in time. If it takes the police half an hour to respond, and the ghost in the haunted house is going to eat the characters within five minutes, then well...

And if the GM ever really needs to keep the players out of touch of resources, well, all the characters need is a Sprint account, and the phone will drop out of touch with the network simply by entering the wrong building.
posted by happyroach at 9:16 PM on March 29, 2015 [3 favorites]


Well, GMs can find a way around it with their omnipotent powers but it's often a lazy player crutch: "I Google this, or that"
posted by reiichiroh at 9:20 PM on March 29, 2015


I've kinda set myself up for the reverse challenge: interstellar sci-fi where you still can't send a signal that travels faster than the speed of light. Sure, you can put a letter on a drone and the drone might go faster than light, but even then you're still dealing with scheduled mail service.

So now I keep having to remind myself that no, the guy on Planet A can't just pick up the phone and call his mom on Planet B. News isn't instantaneous. Diplomacy between stars takes days and weeks and even months.

It's surprising how unnatural that feels.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 9:24 PM on March 29, 2015 [2 favorites]


Well, GMs can find a way around it with their omnipotent powers but it's often a lazy player crutch: "I Google this, or that"

Well, why shouldn't they? I'd submit that if a given scenario depends on hiding information that can easily be Gogled, then it's not a very good scenario. And that goes for literary plotting as well as game design.
posted by happyroach at 9:38 PM on March 29, 2015 [2 favorites]


cf. how they always had to come up with some reason why the Star Trek communicators or transporter wouldn't work, so that the landing parties were stuck on the planet
posted by thelonius at 11:23 PM on March 29, 2015 [3 favorites]


It isn’t just the novelty of the drone’s-eye view, of which this may be the first instance in literature (and if it isn’t, I’d love to know about others).
Mm. The "Camera Eye" sections of the USA trilogy might be seen as an attempt by Dos Passos to provide his own unblinking drone's-eye view on his period. And at the other end of the century, Gibson and Sterling use their own Eye to structure The Difference Engine. As a conceit, the "drone's-eye view" is delightful; as a narrative strategy I'm not convinced that there is anything that new about it.

In fact, a lot of the anxieties at the core of these contemporary stories and the strategies that are available to evoke them in prose seem pretty, shall we say, classically modernist. Two cheers, then, for neo-modernism!
posted by octobersurprise at 6:41 AM on March 30, 2015


For GM's dealing with cell phones, it seems pretty straight forward. The reaction to summoning help with a cellphone in a dicey situation should be the caller going "You want me to go where?" and then either massive money and/or favors owed. And that's ignoring spoofing, jamming and tracing. I'm also surprised that there hasn't been any tension in either a RPG or in fiction where somebody googles something and gets the wrong answer. Maybe wikipedia had just been trolled and the bots haven't gotten to the cleanup. Maybe the blackhat SEO people have outsmarted google that day. Either way, information on the internet does not have the be accurate. (See also: GamerGate, 9/11 Truthers, any other conspiracy theory)

Part of me feels that this is literary fiction suddenly finding itself in a well trod field of scifi. Science fiction has been dealing with instantaneous communication at any point for at least 60 years. I suspect some of the reluctance may be a desire not to trip into the future where everything is changing so rapidly, where you either are left behind the times or have to make predictions.
posted by Hactar at 2:12 PM on March 30, 2015


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