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 media 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.”
iPeriod. It isn’t free, but I’m quite delighted to see it exists.
Jet Blue now auctions tickets on eBay. Says Wired, “JetBlue’s decision to go the eBay route might also signal a more widespread softness in demand for air travel.”
Handmade Looking Writing
Reviewing “Lesser Panda,” by Sarah Morris at White Cube in London, The Guardian’s Adrian Searle recently wrote “Technically, Morris’s paintings are so accomplished there is nowhere for them to go. They are what they are and do what they do, resolutely declaring themselves as both product and spectacle.”
But…
Next to a Sarah Morris painting I feel sweaty, awkward, street-soiled and gangling. There’s not a bleed of paint, an errant hair or a fly trapped anywhere in the paint. If Morris’s horizontals or verticals ever appear off-whack, it is because the world is wrong. Euclid would run screaming from the room.To witness such perfection in a handmade object is wearying. Even Mondrian was allowed blips. Barnett Newman was positively sloppy. Morris’s unremitting dazzle is somehow soulless and inhuman, which I guess is the intention. However much the colour sings and the Olympic quoits jump and shuffle about, the general effect is alienating.
Reading that, I was reminded of an interview with Margaret Kilgallen, where she said she tries her best to make her lines even, but she doesn’t mind some asymmetry or crookedness as it is the sign of a human touch.
Will the Kilgallen way ever be the prevailing attitude toward online writing: the idea that a typo here or there is just the sign of a human being behind the text?
Were an artist to seek “perfection” in every painting, the end result would likely be fewer paintings. Some artists are better at it: a tighter grip, keener eye, or a number of other reasons can enable more precision. While it is true there is some laziness to letting a line get crooked, I don’t know of any art critic holding it against an artist unless it’s obvious.
Published writers aren’t allowed mistakes. To many, any kind of error proves absence of authority. Previously, we discussed the unlikelihood of conversational artificial life any time soon. The English language just has too many words, each nuanced with a number of scarcely interpretable resonances. But someday we’ll be talking to robots and they’ll be writing our press releases. And when they do, will it seem cool to let go a misspelling or a grammatical error here or there? You know…just to keep the reader on his toes.
The amount of email we all struggle with means if you aren’t born with a copyediting sixth sense, you probably made several errors today. The l33t-speak “teh” once seemed to signal “I’m too busy to backspace.” (Don’t we often feel that way? I’ve got something like 50 emails weighing on my shoulders and I’d love it if half the future recipients wouldn’t be offended if I type the message out as fast as I think it.)
Also, we make tradeoffs with our time. Time is allocated depending on the priority of the recipient. A document I turn in to my employer is edited line by line several times. But with emails to friends, I don’t just skip spell check — sometimes I don’t read it over before pressing send (which usually leads to clarifications in the Re:s, but anyway!) My blog is somewhere in the middle. Fretting over the spelling and grammar eats into the short time I have to write the posts. And writing out my ideas is the point of this blog. That being said, it’s the first page result googling my name, and on the off chance someone important is checking it out, I don’t want to appear hasty or incompetent.
That’s what spelling and grammar is all about: appearances. There are people out there who, no matter what you accomplish in life, will view you as at a third grade intellect if your tenses don’t match.
Tech Dirt recently wrote:
There’s a class of folks (you know who you are!) who are well known in any kind of written forum/blog/email list etc. It’s the infamous “Grammar Nazi.” There are nice Grammar Nazis — and we appreciate those — and then there are the obnoxious Grammar Nazis who like to imply that you are the stupidest person to ever touch a keyboard because you mixed up affect and effect. From my perspective, I certainly appreciate the folks who point out the grammatical errors we make (we try to fix them quickly, if it makes sense), though I often find it silly to get bogged down in some of the minutiae of certain grammar rules that for all intents and purposes are almost universally ignored.
He also explains a nice Grammar Nazi (”usually emails us privately”) and the obnoxious kind (”always, always, always posts their comments publicly.”) By the way, if a writer does happen to write “you’re” instead of “your”: yes, he probably does know the difference, dearest helpful readers. Those of us without the sixth sense sometimes type homophones when we are working fast.
What is particularly vexing about the correctors is the implication that someone who makes typos doesn’t deserve to write. This is the belief of elementary school English teachers, at least when I was growing up. Points were docked for misplaced commas or misspellings, so the person with the highest grade didn’t necessarily write the greatest essay.
The best editors aren’t the best writers. I like the first draft quality of Philip K. Dick’s books. Maybe Gertrude Stein wasn’t as self-aware as people thought, when it came to her run-on sentences. I hate to think the reason modern literature is such a wasteland these days is because the genius novelist we’ve been waiting for was turned away by a Random House editor, “Ah, he can’t spell.”
Art by Sarah Morris.
Previously:
Saying Yes and Hearing No
Open Source Art: Will There Ever Be Another Lily Chou-Chou?
Alright, Sokay: Tomorrow’s English Language
The New Wave of Neural-Advertising in Michael Crichton’s “Looker”
“Teresa” by Dan Witz: a painting of a nude woman playing with her iPhone. Quite nice, actually.
BBC reports on e-waste dumping in Ghana. It’s a good overview of the problem: Western countries avoid bans on exporting dead computers (and their toxic contents) by shipping them abroad off as “usable second-hand goods” — much worse as this can be a tax write-off. An expert estimates 90% of the computers shipped to Africa are “just junk.” More from Treehugger’s Simran Sethi on HuffPost.
Steven Popkes posts about Nature’s documentary on the Antikythera mechanism, and the machine’s relevance to the Olympics: “The Games had to happen every four years on the full moon closest to the summer solstice. Now, let’s think about that. This machine related the lunar cycle to the solar cycle– two cycles that have no natural connection…. [it] had to figure out solstices, full moons, etc., in relationship to one another, with nothing but rods and gears. And it does it beautifully.” Last year, the New Yorker had a long article about its significance. More in todays NYT.
A million years ago, in Internet years, we had Blogdex and Daypop to keep track of the most-linked blog posts. Then spammers took over and they became useless. Now there’s RSSMeme, which shows the most “shared” stories of the day. It saves me from subscribing to a lot of the really popular (and really repetitive) feeds, by just showing the best stuff. I doubt spammers are going to start setting up Google Reader accounts to rig the results, (although, I wouldn’t put it past them.)
”It may be possible that young people who have no experience of a world without online societies put less value on their real world identities and can therefore be at risk in their real lives, perhaps more vulnerable to impulsive behaviour or even suicide. This is definitely a line of reasoning that warrants more investigation and research.” - Dr Himanshu Tyagi at the Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (via.)
Please Don’t Leave a Facebook Comment on My Birthday
I’m trying hard here to word this in the right way, without sounding exasperated or too demanding, because it’s not the worst thing in the word — but it is unfortunate there is no Emily Post for our generation, spelling out why and how we might best celebrate birthdays. The “happy birthday” comments on my social network pages get a fraction of my attention, as it took a fraction of the attention of the 
person who wrote it. Perhaps it wouldn’t trouble me if it didn’t seem a substitute for presence or substantial communication.
First there is the question of why it matters anyway. Aren’t we a little too old for birthdays? It’s true, some are indifferent to the annual “special day” but most of us just out of habit are not. It’s the one day of the year to receive special attention without doing anything to earn it: our personal New Year in order to reassess the paths we’ve taken and expect to take.
Plus, we grow up demanding this attention. It’s the best day in a child’s life, and one she waits for all month. For children, going to someone’s birthday is almost as fun as having your own. Becuase there will be cake and an inflatable castle in the backyard, or, at the very least, a slip-n-slide.
In college, replace “drinks” with “cake.” You ask the seniors to “buy” for you and get drunk in the dorms. But sometime, once school is done, a birthday is too much of a hassle to celebrate. For the birthday person, it’s a little awkward to send an email out: “Hi friends, please pay tribute to me at this sushi restaurant. By the way, I’m not one of those people that expects gifts but it would be nice to see you all.” For the invitees, well, sometimes they feel they have other priorities.
A text message, “Can’t make it tonight sick/busy/tired,” is an everyday disappointment, but on one’s birthday, it’s difficult not to take it personally. I thought I was the only one who got upset about this, until I went out with my friend, at the club he was DJing the night of his birthday. There was only the lightest shower just before he started playing, but he received text message after text message, “I’d go out, but it’s too rainy.”
Friends of mine, five years or more older, who actually have the sort of responsibilities one would assume might cut into their social time, never seem to do this, but with friends five years younger — forget it. Were there a Getting Things Done-style book for keeping up with friends, well articulated methods how not to alienate ourselves from the people we like best, no one would read it anyway. A shame, as I find so much of my email consists of messages back and forth from friends on why one or the other can’t meet up on this or that day. We all over-extend ourselves, because we can. But what it seems to bring about is what, T. S. Elliot called the “sty of contentment.”
And so you get the Facebook and Myspace comments instead. Both applications allow for no one to forget your birthday. But, here’s the thing, it requires nothing of a person to type and post two words and an exclamation point on a page. This is all part of the problem of time and attention, and also of priorities. I don’t know anyone too busy to watch The Wire or Man Men, but somehow we get too busy to meet up with friends.
Images by Laurie Simmons. The first a still from The Music of Regret
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