October 21st, 2012
Television shows, movies, and even books are finding it hard to grasp technology in relation to the rest of the narrative. Watch any episode of Law & Order: SVU and you may be faced with a troubled girl who's missing, but detectives are close to tracking her down because of her last post on "Facespace."
It's easier to address our dependence on technology in films and on television because the medium is visual. Text messages appear on tiny screens and the audience is able to read them without anything being said. Computers on CSI display images of DNA comparisons, the results of which instantly emerge from HP printers beside the monitors.
But books are different. The Internet may have been around for decades, but many contemporary fiction writers don't address it the way historical fiction writers might reference quill pens or steam engines.
In an essay from The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, David Gates comments on how to address technology in fiction (↬ The Millions):
I have no idea how to handle this new mode of living (I guess “living” is the word) in fiction. I probably spend more time emailing and reading online than I do having non-virtual human contact — and I bet I’m not that unusual. If my characters were like that, would their lives be eventful enough to write about? On the other hand, if I write about people for whom the internet is — as far as the reader can see — peripheral or nonexistent, am I not essentially writing historical fiction?
The Internet, cell phones, texting - they're all around us. They're ubiquitous, like pens and pencils (sometimes moreso), but there's another issue that isn't being addressed when it comes to novel writing (which seems apt, as NaNoWriMo is just around the corner) - the naming and referencing of specific technology in fiction.
As Shawn Syms at The Toronto Review of Books states:
Yet, even given the ongoing supremacy battles between Facebook and Google Plus, does it make sense to make either central to a short story? “Avoid over-reliance on au courant references in your writing,” my first writing teacher advised. It’s a fair point—stories that mention Hall & Oates or Atari or Usenet quickly become dated. By the time your fiction collection is published, both brands may have gone the way of the Betamax. Or VHS, for that matter.
I'm running into this issue with a book I'm currently working on. It's set in the present and I'm trying to encapsulate my generation, the obnoxiously called "Millenial" generation.
There are references to smartphones, emails, text messages, which I think can be handled pretty adeptly these days. After all, as Gates implies above, phones, emails, and texts have become so interwoven into our daily lives it would be odd to not acknowledge them at all in a contemporarily-set novel. And since I'm attempting to capture a certain era in time, an era plagued by phones at the dinner table and emails before bed, it would be pretty bizarre to pretend the twenty-somethings I'm writing about don't participate in those kinds of things.
But what about the specific, branded technology we interact with each day? I posed this question yesterday on Twitter:
Fellow writers, if ur novel uses social media, do you fabricate names (i.e. "Facespace" for Facebook) or do u use the real names? #amwriting
—- Harry Marks (@HarryCMarks) October 19, 2012{: data-datetime=”2012-10-19T17:40:21+00:00”} {: .twitter-tweet}
I got some pretty varied responses:
@harrycmarks sometimes it's better to fabricate because think of how many ppl will know what myspace is another 10 yrs from now
—- MaryBeth (@MBMulhall) October 19, 2012{: data-datetime=”2012-10-19T17:41:39+00:00”} {: .twitter-tweet data-in-reply-to=”259348272571875329”}
@harrycmarks When I read in a book or hear in a show or movie, something like Facespace, I instantly can't take it seriously.
—- Jonathan Norman (@jonathannorman1) October 19, 2012{: data-datetime=”2012-10-19T17:41:47+00:00”} {: .twitter-tweet data-in-reply-to=”259348272571875329”}
@harrycmarks As a reader I really get hung up on faked names, if they’re supposed to connotate something real.
—- Malte Hazard (@MalHaz) October 19, 2012{: data-datetime=”2012-10-19T17:43:56+00:00”} {: .twitter-tweet data-in-reply-to=”259348272571875329”}
After that brief influx of responses, I remembered my feelings when watching a movie or television show where social media was involved and I, too, got frustrated when they tried to fictionalize a real brand. It's obvious that "FaceUnion" was meant to represent Facebook on SVU, so I was left wondering, "Why didn't they just use 'Facebook?'"
Obviously, these shows are meant to reflect a Hollywood-ized version of real life with their "ripped from the headlines" plots, so my instinct is to go as authentic as possible. Currently, my book straddles the line between real and fake. I've used "Kevslist" as a stand in for Craigslist, but I've also used "Facebook" to represent the actual Zuckerberg-created social network, mainly because I couldn't think of anything else to name it at the time.
However, since my goal is to paint a picture of my generation as it exists now, I'd rather not pull readers out of the story by reading about "Facespace" when it's obvious I'm referring to Facebook. What if Stephen King had written "Christine" about a 1958 "Salem Rage?" One of the best things about that book is knowing I could go out and buy my own Plymouth Fury if I ever had the money.
If I was writing a science fiction book set in a future when social networks might be totally different from what we have now (or not exist at all), I'd invent new names for them. But since I'm writing about the present, and a very realistic present at that, I think my readers would feel better knowing they were reading about real services as opposed to superficial concoctions from my own mind. I want readers to think, "This could really happen," as opposed to, "Ah, I see what he did there - ePort is meant to be eBay. Lame."