“Your Phone Is Ruining You For Us“ – Robert Lanham, The Awl

It is just unbelievable how “old man yells at cloud” 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, it’s just like…how much of a fucking dinosaur do you have to be to write paragraphs like this?  And it’s not just this dude. 

I mean, you can’t throw a rock without you hitting some cranky middle-aged white-dude author who’s been kind of successful (or really successful) for a while now going “Kids 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 they’re simultaneously more connected than ever before.”

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 you’re “stuck” being unable to set your work past the ’90s?  You do realize that you’re 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 you’re left sincerely judging these things by their ad campaigns. 

You don’t 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 that’s 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 can’t come up with a way to make phone-use interesting and plot-advancing?  Sorry, that’s you sucking.

Technology isn’t perfect.  Technology isn’t uniformly accessible.  Technology is subject to user error, and outages, and sabotage, and theft.

Remember this?

[London tube announcement sign reading “For the benefit of passengers using Apple iOS 6, local area maps are available from the booking office.”]

Yeah.  GoogleMaps will quite frequently send you rabbiting through a loop of toll road for no reason, too.  Or confidently insist that your new dentist’s 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 they’re in the bathroom can cast a completely new light on things they’ve 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 someone’s 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 didn’t have one in order to explain why characters didn’t 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 you’re on the side of the fucking road being attacked by a fucking O-T-T-E-R, and no, you don’t have a fucking address to give them.

If you don’t want to bother with that, fine.  If you prefer to write in a time when these things didn’t have to be taken into account, that’s fine, too.  But don’t sit there acting like it can’t 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.

(via stuckinabucket)

— 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 CAN’T fix everything. Resist the impulse to create a circumstance that eliminates tech (such as, no one’s phone works for X bullshit reason) and step into an undiscovered country of plot points NO ONE HAS THOUGHT OF YET.

(via annerocious)

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 didn’t predict that we’d like to check neko atsume every half hour given the chance. But they also did include limitations, interruptions, etc. that didn’t happen to come true. Often in ways that are way more inconvenient than ‘ugh why cant I turn off facebook alerts.’ 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?

(via betterbemeta)