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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