Compare the following props that might appear in a story:
- a pearl-handled straight razor
- an Egyptian broach
- a 1964 six-shooter pistol
- a bag of marijuana
- a faded polaroid photo of twin, pre-teen, strawberry blonde girls at a fishing trip cut in two with scissors, separating the twins
I was recently trying to come up with an idea for a story set in a realistic “here and now” context: with ordinary people, but without the use of any narrative device to make the setting surreal, dystopian, or magical as I like to use. And I realized any such realistic story would have to include people texting, using smartphones, using tablets or other new gadgetry. This is a problem.
Not because I’m a technophobe or Luddite. I own a smartphone. Tech gadgets could not be left out of a contemporary book because in the last 10 years tech gadgetry has become so ubiquitous that to leave them out would be a glaring omission; it would compromise the attempted realism, like leaving horses out of a western.
But to me, these props are so utterly clumsy and banal and fadish that they would be unusable in a serious writing effort. Of course, it’s all so new that there are not many books to refer to with people texting and looking stuff up on their new tablet. But if they did, I cannot imagine it being anything but clammy to the reader and cumbersome to the experience of reading the story.
Unless you’re 
writing the next Bridget Jones’s Diary. Then maybe. Or a satire conducted entirely in text messages. But I’m not talking about that kind of writing. Also remember, I’m not bashing gadgets. I’m only saying I do not believe they will work in good, serious fiction.
So what’s wrong with new tech? My hypothesis is that new tech has no story-ness about it, no sex appeal, no history, no cultural cachet. Also, the current national narrative about social media and hot new electronic gadgetry is that it is killing relationships, stifling conversations, turning kids into transfixed, sedentary addicted lumps. Much of the commentary about Facebook is that it substitutes real communication, authentic feelings and true community for an ersatz, pithy, sloganeering, avatar-ized, bogus circle of unheard, mostly unseen “friends.”
In my opinion, the appearance of the newest Samsung tablet with HD whatever is not merely hopelessly unliterary, but damning, an instant bomb. From my perspective, new tech in fiction is unwritable. I’m sure some writers attempt it—books to read on the beach, YA fiction, chic lit (although YA usually happens in an imaginary place where the absence of tech is not a problem: Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Twilight).
And maybe some people like that story-set-in-MY-world feel. I don’t. There needs to be some distance, some escape from my boring world. I cannot imagine Cormac McCarthy doing it. Who wants to read a book about their own life and setting? You get that every day!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OINa46HeWg8&w=420&h=315]
