New Media in Fiction: Will There Ever Be an “iPhone Novel”?
There’s really only one author right now who writes about message board activity and email exchanges without boring or distracting the reader. Unsurprisingly, that’s William Gibson. No one else has quite figured out how to integrate the action of reading an email without breaking up the narrative. As soon as you introduce everyday communicative technology, the novel takes an experimental, scrapbook feel (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.)
Since publishing houses insist on signing authors from the same several area codes, from the same age bracket, writing books with protagonists that age and of that area code, their fictional characters are probably iPhone owners. Considering the lag between submission and publication, summer of 2009 might be the first time we’ll see it mentioned in fiction. But I doubt there will be a “iPhone novel” — it will be mentioned by name but the actual experience of using it will be ignored.
I’m not a tech-pessemist and don’t agree with much of Nicholas Carr’s arguments, but I think the absence of technology in literature is worth investigating. Does this mean that all fiction is now science fiction: a thought experiment in plotting a world without technological distractions?
Many contemporary novelists do away with any mentions of mobile phones and email, even when it seems implausible. This is especially curious in science fiction. (I haven’t yet read Neal Stephenson’s newest novel Anathem, but my understanding is its an allegorical critique of the Internet.) Typical sci-fi plots now tend to be about post-scarcity/ surplus information or revisionist histories cherry-picking which technologies to exclude and which to imagine. The steampunk trend is the perfect example (its tendency toward cliche I discussed previously.) It eliminates the communicative uses of technology and considers instead transportation and mad science — basement laboratories, solitary undistracted efforts.
The intensity of the 24-hour news cycle, the impatience of waiting for email replies, these frantic, perpetually-shifting day-to-day Internet journeys … can these be novelized? Let me try…
None of my friends were at the party so I pulled out my iPhone as I waited. I checked out Mary on Facebook and realized she has a new boyfriend. His profile was set to private so I looked him up on google and found an old Myspace profile he hasn’t updated in 2 years, but it says his favorite band is Wolf Parade and someone left a comment that he left his white Wafarers at her place. What a wanker. I twittered something passive aggressive about how I hate hipsters. I click back on his Myspace and see on his “top friends” is my old roommate Andy, so I went to Andy’s Tumblr, when he reblogged something from him that was reblogged by my other ex-girlfriend. Why does this dude know all my girls? There aren’t any pictures of him anywhere so I don’t even know who he is. Anyway, I’m avoiding the show this week cause I just don’t want to see Mary. I twitter something about being sick and probably unable to catch the Ratatat show, thinking maybe she will check and realize I’m not just not showing up cause I don’t want to see her.
Ok, that was a weak attempt, but you see what I mean? It’s the mental process of internal conflict inside another internal conflict, like Russian dolls: each seeming more hollow and insignificant.
It is as of yet untested in the marketplace, but I’m optimistic that the generation growing up with mobile Internet is going to demand novels, and have a hunger for that linear, patient escape that only a good book provides.
I could be wrong here. Reading Radar the print magazine feels just like surfing a bunch of blogs, but it’s not a bad thing. Maybe one day we’ll see a full novelization of someone’s daily experience on the Internet (but please, please don’t write this just because it hasn’t been done before. If you think you can do it well, by all means try, but contemporary literature is not for want of high-concept, shoddily executed work.)
In film and tv, connectivity can be a narrative device (Gossip Girl) or it is just something you don’t show — like characters going to the bathroom. Zachary Pincus-Roth recently wrote an article about how storytelling has changed for the LA Times:
“You would normally do scenes where people would come together face to face,” says Josh Schwartz, executive producer of the network TV shows “Gossip Girl” and “Chuck.” But now, “Why would they come to the door? They would just call.”
Could “24″ exist without cellphones? Jack Bauer would spend 20 minutes every episode searching for a phone booth. The “Gossip Girl” characters would die of boredom without their stream of salacious electronic chitchat.
While cellphones appear to help storytellers, since they allow anyone to talk to anyone at any time, “that seeming freedom only makes it all the more difficult,” says Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru and author of “Story.” “It takes away a possible source of conflict — the difficulty of communicating, the difficulty of calling for help.”
McKee compares the situation to the loosening of rules about depicting sexuality — writers have more options, but they lose the tension created when they’re forced to be implicit rather than explicit. Still, he doesn’t see the development as negative. “All it means is that the writer has to be even more ingenious in building the conflicts and the tensions in a credible way,” he says….
That implied phone creates the potential for audiences to think, “Why doesn’t he just call?” For instance, in “Superbad,” after Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) appears to be getting arrested after buying alcohol with a fake ID, why doesn’t he call his friends to tell them he’s just partying with the cops?
The typical solution is simple: Kill the cellphone. It can be lost (”Sex and the City”), out of range (”Damages,” when Ted Danson is trying to re-call a hit man) or out of battery (Jamie Foxx at the end of “Collateral”). The cellphone death has become the 21st century version of the car not starting when a killer is after you.
You can also listen to Pincus-Roth discuss his article with Brooke Gladstone on On the Media.
At least one film — the wonderful, wonderful All About Lily Chou-Chou — is about activity in chat rooms and message boards. And there’s that movie about the people who met on Criagslist I’ve yet to see.
The seemingly mundane, but actually emotionally complex experience that communicative technology creates might be the exact thing that we’re looking to avoid when we pick up a novel. This is why, with the exception of Gibson, I think it’s for the best novels exist as minimal-technology thought experiments.
Art by Dan Witz
Previously:
Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men
Will Kindle Save “Hypertext” Fiction?
How to Frame the Internet: Attention and the New News Cycle
Update: Interesting comment from Rex Sorgatz, who links to Nick Douglas’s post “The Diablo Cody Effect” and Nav, who writes, “There’s a writer named Zulfikar Ghose who’s classified as a ‘South Asian postcolonial’ writer - but he generally writes vaguely magic-realist stuff set in South America. He still tackles the usual postcolonial themes - exile, migration, hybridity, indeterminacy etc. - but, instead of using the same ole’ locales and ideas, he does it all analogously. I think that’s a possible place to start - in stories about documentation, making the private public, the other ‘virtual space’ as social proxy or prosthesis. But I think what the TM piece said was crucial: that this has to be about stories and people, not (just) ideas.” Also Jeff Sommers explains how when writing novels he will “purposefully avoid mentioning technology explicitly as much as I can. I don’t have a defined theory on this, but in my own reading I find that the easiest way to jolt someone out of a narrative flow is to mention some bygone technology that is no longer even the slightest bit relevant.”
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6 Responses to “New Media in Fiction: Will There Ever Be an “iPhone Novel”?”
Posted by: Cheryl Kaye Tardif - 10/10/2008
Very interesting post, Joanne.
I will let you know that there is one author who is not only incporporating the use of an iPhone into a novel, she’s writing it on her iPhone 3G using the Notes section.
News of this has already reached Canadian media and she’s been interviewed by various reporters for TV radio and newspaper.
And by the way, “she” is me.
http://www.cherylktardif.com/finding-bliss
http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/press-release/canadian-author-cheryl-kaye-tardif-writes-a-novel-titled-finding-bliss-on-the-new-iphone-3g-69000.php
All the best in success!
Cheryl Kaye Tardif,
bestselling author of Whale Song
Posted by: kevin - 10/14/2008
Reason: wariness of the half-life of technology. Action authors love the AK-47 because the thing is going to last FOREVER. In the movie media, you could show the Kalishnikov in an Afghanistan setting in a Bond movie in 1971 and it (and Afghanistan) is still be relevant today.
Historical fiction that the reader couldn’t possibly have lived (pirates, romans) is romantic. Historical fiction that the reader can cringe through the memory of a side ponytail is more niche. Will the message board look similar enough in 10 years (or even by the time the book makes it to print) for the people to accept the writing as current? Takes a different (braver? prescient?) writer.
Posted by: Joanne McNeil - 10/14/2008
Good point. But the absence seems more pronounced in popular “literary” fiction than genre. The basic working of email and message boards hasn’t changed in ten years, although people think of both very differently now, and a larger group uses them. And it’s fair to assume the basic framework will be around and the terms will be used, unless some radically different technology hits the market and then everything seems dated (like have a landline telephone in pre-21c fiction.)
That link about the Diablo Cody effect is pretty relevant here as cultural references — bands, tv shows, product brands — also date a work, but that doesn’t mean people have stopped reading say, American Psycho. Or even the Catcher in the Rye, as Holden talks a lot about now obscure stage stars.
BTW, the only case I’ve heard about a publisher removing dated references is Judy Blume’s books, and that’s because confused eleven year old girls could not figure out what the belts for pads were about: http://feministe.us/blog/archives/2007/08/17/judy-blume-updated/
Posted by: Simen - 10/25/2008
A bit tangential: message board activity in fiction is done brilliantly here: http://www.abyssandapex.com/200710-wikihistory.html
But of course, that is a very short piece, which would probably be tedious and boring if it were any longer, and it also pokes fun at internet culture, and not all fiction that has technology in it should be *about* technology — it’s probably easier to use the blog form to poke fun at blogging or the message board form to poke fun at web forums than it is to integrate it into a story about something else. And the whole text is just a forum thread, so the problem of how to integrate it into a larger text is irrelevant. I guess it doesn’t really address many of the questions you ask. I just wanted to mention it because it’s funny and sort of related. Also, I don’t think it has a “experimental, scrapbook feel”, but that may be because it’s not a novel.
Posted by: Amy Abatangle - 11/05/2008
I’m interested in both the appearance of technology in fiction (characters using email, cell phones, more futuristic devices), but am rather more interested in how to represent the fractured experience of a mediated life. Formal experimentation has always been a marginalized activity, but it seems like there is room for an update to the epistolary novel at the very least. What does it mean when everyone is plugged into a Bluetooth headset or is multitasking with an iPhone? Linear narrative has always seemed a bit disingenuous to me; now, it seems even more so. Technology has made life that much more prismatic, and linear experiences have been replaced not so much by the shattered experiences of postmodernist/deconstructionist discourse but by a new synthesis, one that demands that each of us make sense of that much more information, experience and interaction in our daily lives. That process of keeping an internal narrative going (not to mention the multithreaded, social interactions now incumbent upon us) is where each of us creates meaning from experience. I’d like to see *that* in fiction.
Posted by: Rachel - 11/12/2008
Is it possible that our current narrative conventions just don’t include room for all the incidental knowledge we glean from our use of technology? I wonder if there is a need for a kind of description that highlights the digital environment the way one would describe a physical setting in a novel - pertinent details and overall mood guiding the reader’s imagination.
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