The internet (and Facebook in particular — the search interface for people as opposed to things (Amazon) or facts (Google: NB, sprinkle with irony to taste)) is another phenomenon you can't leave out of a story without going seriously retro. In fact, the arrival of internet dating made a big impact on the contemporary romance sub-genre: a bunch of older how-do-you-meet-someone plots went out the window, but a whole bunch of new ones showed up.
But meanwhile the eminent mainstream literary faculty are still turning out deeply sensitive realist-mode explorations of the human condition that totally neglect the tech dimension. We live in a world with killer drones, state level actors gaslighting each others' electorates with bots and sock puppets and AI generated user icons, where the average TV viewer is ageing by more than 12 months per year as demographic shift kills the video star and moves everything online, where private space launch companies are listed on the stock market and cars park themselves. A realist-mode 21st century novel that ignores phenomena that were tropes in 20th century SF is a de-facto historical novel...
Our current media environment has scrambled our society's ability to assemble a consensus view of reality so badly that conspiracy theories should be considered toxic. And that's not a good thing from my perspective because it puts the entire viability of creative-lies-that-amuse-and-inform — fiction — in jeopardy.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 21.6 ms ] threadBut meanwhile the eminent mainstream literary faculty are still turning out deeply sensitive realist-mode explorations of the human condition that totally neglect the tech dimension. We live in a world with killer drones, state level actors gaslighting each others' electorates with bots and sock puppets and AI generated user icons, where the average TV viewer is ageing by more than 12 months per year as demographic shift kills the video star and moves everything online, where private space launch companies are listed on the stock market and cars park themselves. A realist-mode 21st century novel that ignores phenomena that were tropes in 20th century SF is a de-facto historical novel...
Our current media environment has scrambled our society's ability to assemble a consensus view of reality so badly that conspiracy theories should be considered toxic. And that's not a good thing from my perspective because it puts the entire viability of creative-lies-that-amuse-and-inform — fiction — in jeopardy.