Hi! How ya doin? How's your day been? Ah,
interesting. So here's something to consider: I, the person currently speaking to you and
flagrantly encouraging parasociality, am not really here. I mean, I'm somewhere, probably
napping or thinking about space, but I'm not here, right now, speaking to you. What you're
seeing is a form of recorded communication saved to a storage device somewhere in Youtube's
servers before being accessed and replayed by whatever cell phone, tablet, computer or
TV set you're currently looking at. And that's just one of the many forms of extremely impressive
high-tech telecommunication we've gotten totally used to despite that being absolutely wild
when you think about it. The words I said in a cozy recording booth weeks or months
or even years ago have been wound up and frozen in time by a large amount of extremely complicated
technology latticed across thousands of miles with a chain of developmental history stretching
back centuries, and then you pressed "play" and set them unspooling, creating the illusion
of communication even though you and I are nowhere near each other in space or in time.
Of course, there's a reason we aren't constantly losing our minds about the wondrous technological
advancements that surround us. "Normalcy" is a completely relative concept, and people
are extremely good at adapting to new developments and absorbing them into their concept of "normal".
If you've lived with something for long enough, it becomes an established fact of your reality,
and you see it as "normal" and thus not worth thinking about too hard no matter how buckwild
it might actually be on closer examination. But because of how good we are at seeing things
as normal, it's actually very useful to sometimes take a step back and look at the world around
us with fresh eyes - to see what factors are invisibly shaping our lives and perhaps even
examine how they came to be the way that they are. The way we think about ourselves and
the people around us is strongly affected by the social and technological landscape
we inhabit, and as new things enter those spaces and then become "normal" and thus invisible,
we can be changed without even noticing it. For instance, have you noticed how many stories
have magic cell phones now? Lemme explain. "Communication" is a crucial
element of storytelling - not just on a meta-level, in that all storytelling is technically a
form of communication from the teller to the audience - but within the structure of the
story, characters being able or unable to communicate is a huge factor on the plot.
Most obviously, miscommunication plots naturally rely on the characters having an imperfect
mode of communication with each other, mishearing or misunderstanding or only getting a fraction
of the information they need. Dramatic irony is a meta-trope that relies on the audience
having information that the characters don't, frequently resulting in situations where the
audience is rooting for the characters to communicate that information with each other
and stop acting unwisely based on their incomplete knowledge. Overall, a lot of plots rely on
the characters having incomplete information about the story they're in, and one way to
facilitate this is to limit the amount of information those characters can communicate
to each other. And of course there's a lot of drama to be derived from characters trying
to find people - if someone's gone missing or been captured or injured, the drama comes
from trying to find and retrieve them when they naturally can't communicate where they
are. Stress and fear can be provoked if the characters don't know for sure that another
character is all right, or even if they're alive. And all of this hinges on the characters
being unable to perfectly communicate at all times.
And fortunately for the writers, just like in real life, if the characters aren't physically
right next to each other or broadly within earshot, it's generally expected that they
won't be able to communicate without the use of some form of long-distance communication
technology, and if they don't have that, they'll be out of communication until they can get
back in the same place. Thus it's extremely easy to facilitate miscommunication or limited-information
plots because the characters just need to be physically separated. When characters are
out of communication, they by necessity act in isolation since they can't coordinate with
each other. They don't know for sure what the other character's situation is or what
they're doing, and a lot of drama can result from that, like if the backup gets ambushed
or someone gets betrayed at a crucial moment and nobody realizes til the plan's already
halfway fallen apart. So many plots have been facilitated by characters not being able to
call for help or contact authorities. As a rule, in most standard story structures, unless
a character explicitly has an ability or technology that'll allow them to send a message long-distance,
characters are expected to be isolated unless they are physically in the presence of their
allies. And for the vast majority of human history,
this was normal. This was the expected state of being. Unless someone was actively choosing
to be in communication with someone else, they were alone.
But normal has changed. The march of progress in telecommunications technology has incremented
our concept of what level of communication is "normal". It's impossible to find reliable
statistics on how many people in the world have access to cell phones and cell networks
- trust me, I tried - but at the bare minimum we know it's more people than have ever had
access to cell phones before. On top of that, the wide array of messenger apps and programs
and sites make it possible for almost any modern device to chat with any other, so a
desktop computer can chat with a cell phone can chat with a tablet no problem, giving
people even more ways to stay in contact regardless of what specific device they might have access
to. And of course if you have an iPhone you can text somebody with an Android, etc etc.
The world is more connected than it has ever been, and that invisible paradigm is reflected
in the stories we tell - even the ones set in fantastical otherworlds or spec-fic futures.
When it comes to communication, the assumed state of normalcy has reversed. Before, being
able to contact somebody was a deviation from the norm - you had to send a letter or a telegram
or a phone call or an email, and they had to be in the right place or at the right time
to receive it. Now, we tend to assume that if we can't get in contact with somebody almost
immediately, something is wrong. Maybe their battery died or they're stuck somewhere with
no reception or their phone was destroyed or they're out of commission and can't answer.
A million things could've gone wrong to knock them off the grid, but that's only worrying
to us because the assumption is that they should be on the grid at all times.
And modern stories have started to reflect that. Aside from stories set in the nominal
present where characters just have normal cell phones and use them as expected, there
are tons of stories that contrive little bits of magic or tech to enable the characters
to stay in almost constant communication over long distances. You got Leverage, which back
in 2008 already had earbuds that are basically invisible hands-free phones; Young Justice
kicked off the very first season in 2010 by giving the team a telepathic link maintained
almost constantly by Miss Martian that was basically a fancier groupchat; the nominally
historical low-magic setting of Netflix's Castlevania adds magic mirrors in the second
season that are basically used for facetime and, let's be honest, felt a little bit weird;
2018's She-Ra had Bow invent personal communicators that are basically ipads for video calls - in
all of these settings, regardless of how fantastical they are, something can be contrived out of
the magic or tech to allow for constant, instant communication between protagonists even when
they're far away. And this is a reasonable development! After all, it's incredibly convenient
for the writers and the characters, and since being out of communication is so risky and
inconvenient, it makes sense that the characters would want to find a way to stay in touch!
Through psychic powers or magic or gadgets made by tech geniuses characters can keep
each other updated on their current plans, find each other if they're missing, call for
help when they're in a tight spot to enable dramatic rescues - and someone breaking communication
can be a great way to facilitate instant drama. Not to mention letting the villains coordinate
over long distances can make it much easier to give the heroes trouble, so even if the
heroes are fairly low-tech, giving the villains scrying technology or hologram-phones or something
is pretty classic stuff to contrive more complicated challenges for the good guys - in the history
of literature and storytelling, bad guys got magic cell phones a lot earlier than good
guys. Plus, if the writer wants to make it impossible for the characters to communicate,
it's not hard to contrive something like a jammer or a psychic bad-vibes field or something
to temporarily cut off communication and force the characters to operate in isolation again,
with the added tension that, since it's no longer the expected norm, they're not accustomed
to it. It turns out giving your characters the ability to communicate instantly across
long distances doesn't destroy the drama of limited contact or failure to communicate,
it just changes the circumstances under which miscommunication or limited-information plots
happen. And frankly I think a lot of this is just
easier for modern writers, because at this point we're so used to being able to just
text somebody for a quick update that it's hard to figure out how some of these story
beats would work without that ability. The way we think about communication is on a level
similar to muscle memory - so deeply ingrained we don't even think about it in words. We
want to check in with a friend, we reach for the phone and sent a text. Well, what if we
don't have the phone? What if the battery's dead? What if the reception's gone wack? Uh…………
PANIC! No, no, that's dramatic. Of course there are other ways to reach them. But those
ways require more thought, more information, and are less readily and immediately available.
How many of us have memorized all our friends' mailing addresses, or even their phone numbers,
when messenger apps are so much easier to habituate to? When chatting with a friend
is as simple as "type or dictate into pocket rectangle for a few seconds and then wait
for it to go ding", the level of communication we take for granted becomes sky high. And
as writers, if we're not very careful, that reflects into our characters. But that's not
a bad thing! It's not story-breaking, it's just story-changing! There's plenty of drama
to be derived here, everything from "has anyone heard from our teammate, they went dark hours
ago" to a character just really, really wanting to not answer the phone. And as long as the
ability to link up the characters for long-distance communication makes sense in-setting, it's
totally fine to let the characters magically text or psychically chat or whatever specific
reskin we're using to make it fit the vibe! It makes sense that the characters would want
to be able to do that. And conveniently, there are plenty of fictional methods for facilitating
easy, constant, continuous communication, from magic mirrors to commlinks to telepathic
teammates - so we can just let the characters do that, no harm no foul! It's easy!
…Hey, yea, wait a second. If these stories have had that kinda plot device the whole
time… how did we justify all those problems that could've been solved with the equivalent
of a cell phone? Why didn't these solutions work back then? Or, more accurately, why didn't
we think of them sooner? Many of these "magic cell phone" stories are
installments of long-running franchises that never used those powers or that technology
that way before the mid-to-late-2000s. When 2010's Young Justice had M'Gann hook up everyone's
brains for zero-effort psychic groupcalls, it made me question why they didn't do that
in 2006's Legion of Superheroes, or 2001's Justice League, or 2000's X-Men: Evolution,
or any number of superhero stories where one of the protagonists is a powerful telepath
and the team's inability to consistently communicate over long distances is a frequent source of
frustration or difficulty. When the Star Wars prequels gave the jedi tiny handheld commlinks
and interplanetary hologram phone calls, it made me wonder why the entire plot of 1977's
A New Hope hinges on a droid physically carrying a message through contested interplanetary
space, and why in The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo has to physically travel out into
a snowstorm to find Luke before he freezes because Luke has no way to signal or call
for help. Now that we're so used to a level of ready instant communication, when we see
a story that hinges on characters that are able to do that not doing it, we notice. The concept of a cell phone is not complicated
by sci-fi standards. A small handheld device that allows for instantaneous audio communication
with anyone else with a similar device, that can optionally also instantaneously send and
receive written messages. That is much less complicated, conceptually speaking, than a
holodeck, and in fact has existed in fiction for a frankly shockingly long time. The first
fictional "wireless telephone" is from 19-goddamn-14, in L. Frank Baum's Tik-Tok of Oz, another
frighteningly prescient prediction. And science fiction has always involved conceiving of
speculative technology and then theorizing how its existence would alter the world and
the society it integrates into. Not every sci-fi author tries to predict the future,
but the genre's foundations are built on the concept of worldbuilding futuristic visions.
And on the fantasy side of things, the concept of a magic mirror or a crystal ball or psychic
visions are much older than the technology that developed to reflect it. Many of these
stories have always had the in-universe ability to facilitate Basically Texting, but most
of them didn't, and as far as I can tell, none of them did it to the degree of universality
that we've reached in real life. Some of these modern "magic cell phones" have been introduced
into long-running settings and, despite the technology or magic involved being in-universe
possible the whole time, the writers only started thinking to use it that way after
their own lives were quietly changed by getting acclimated to the same technology. In the
same way that it's frankly just easier for modern writers to give their main characters
the equivalent of the level of communication they're personally used to, it was frankly
easier for these older writers to do the same with their characters, even if the writer
lived in a world where the telegram was the new hotness and the characters lived in a
world with magic or psychic powers or wireless goddamn telephones.
Huh! Sorry, I still can't get over that. Oh my god. Anyway, we're fine. Everything's good. The world we live in has been very deeply
changed by the communication tech we currently have. It's difficult to notice because of
how normal it's become, but it's a fundamental shift in the way we think about people and
our ability to stay in contact with them, which is a very fundamentally human thing.
You know, humans are very social animals, to the point where just not speaking to other
humans for a long enough time can start messing us up. I think it's very interesting that
this has produced a shift in the way writers handle communication in fiction, and I think
it's even more interesting that, as far as I can tell, nobody quite predicted it. Even
when spec-fic writers conceived of a technology capable of doing what our current communication
tech does, or conceived of an overall very advanced level of technology that we think
it would make sense for this to exist in, they didn't extrapolate out what it would
mean to have instantaneous contact with everyone in your social circle just a few clicks away,
and how that would shift the kinds of stories that would or would not make sense.
So I went looking through a selection from about a century of sci-fi and fantasy to see
how fictional communication tech lined up with the real telecommunication tech from
the era, and how it was used in-universe versus how it could've been used with the benefit
of hindsight, and correspondingly how hard it is to suspend my disbelief now that those
settings didn't develop the level of interconnectedness we enjoy today.
As mentioned, in 1914 L Frank Baum wrote "Tik-Tok of Oz", which features a "wireless telephone"
that allows audio communication over any distance. As a bonus, Queen Ozma also has a "magic picture"
that basically works like a fantasy crystal ball, letting her see anything from anywhere,
but with no sound. This is a huge deal, but it's actually pretty manageable on the suspension-of-disbelief
side of things, because as far as I can tell there's only two of these wireless telephones
and Ozma is basically the god-empress of Oz, so just because she has high-tech toys to
play with doesn't mean the common masses would get to use them. Oz doesn't have a robust
telecommunications network, it's just a panopticon. Now at this point in history, the telegraph
and telegram system was pretty well established and wired phone lines were several decades
old, but the two way radio had just been invented back, so the vast majority of real-world communication
tech relied on people either basically sending letters or being physically near their specific
phone when it rang, but it was understood that radio-style portable communication tech
was technically possible. Real telecom tech took several leaps forward
in the 30s and 40s thanks to a little thing called world war two, which really did a lot
to encourage the development of tech that'd let people communicate even if they weren't
in a specific known location, which in dense military terms is known as "bad." Walkie Talkies
were figured out in 1936, and the very first Mobile Telephone Service was invented in 1946,
functioning based on VHF radio - this was technically the first 0G network. Of course,
this didn't mean mobile phone tech was publicly available, it just meant cell service technically
existed. This is around the time we started getting
more long-distance communication in fiction. In 1952, This Island Earth featured a device
called an Interociter that allowed for instant video and audio communication across interstellar
distances, but it was also framed as an incredibly advanced bit of technology, and the main character
being able to build it signaled that he was worthy of getting roped into an interstellar
war. Our old buddy J R R Tolkien wrote Palantirs into the Lord of the Rings in 1954, allowing
long-distance scrying as well as communication but requiring some magical finagling to work.
Palantirs are ancient relics of the First Age and are very rare and very powerful, and
the vast majority of Middle Earth operates on a much more low-tech space where signal
fires are the height of telecom technology. Isaac Asimov got in on the "video call" spec-fic
game in 1957's The Naked Sun, where a culture of pathological introverts live their lives
in total isolation from each other assisted by armies of robot servants, and they get
their human communication in by "viewing" each other through holography.
Real-world tech was taking another gradual step forward this decade, as pager technology
was first patented in 1949 and developed over the course of the 50s, mostly used in hospitals
until the release of the first personal pager in 1962. It couldn't send or receive calls
or messages yet, but it could notify the holder that someone was trying to call them so they
could get to a real telephone and take the call.
Meanwhile in fiction-land, Frank Herbert's Dune in 1965 envisioned a space future ten
thousand years deep where humanity spread across the stars and continued killing each
other in all sorts of exciting ways with a truly staggering glossary of weapons and political
tools - and despite this, communication is almost entirely done through physically transporting
messages, relatively short-range radio, and a ridiculous piece of tech called a Distrans
that the Fremen use for long-distance communication that imprints a coded message into the brain
of a small animal that can then be decoded with another distrans from that animal's cry.
This is hilarious and I literally cannot believe that in eight thousand years of space exploration
and drug-induced hyperspace travel nobody thought of a better way to send a text. This
is where we start getting into the "dubious suspension of disbelief" zone. There are explanations
we can come up with for why communications tech didn't really manifest in the Dune universe,
but they're retroactive justifications for the fact that Frank Herbert... didn't think
of it. It's fine. Speaking of hilarious, 1965 also saw one of
the first installments of Larry Niven's Known Space series, a short story called "Becalmed
in Hell", where spacefaring characters exploring Venus communicate through radio and then when
they're back on earth use telegrams. 1966 was a big year for sci-fi, because we
got Star Trek! Star Trek's communicators allowed crew members to communicate with each other
and the ship, but long-distance communication wasn't really discussed, and since the characters
are rarely far from the Enterprise it's difficult to know the practical range. That said, Star
Trek was actually really good about the characters typically staying in contact with each other,
or at least having the option to, in large part because it was drawing on the real-world
forays into space exploration, where astronauts would rely on radio to maintain constant communication
with their ship and each other, since the vacuum of space kind of limited their options.
So while the crew of the Enterprise staying in near-constant audio communication when
on an away mission seems like a big leap forward, it was actually following in the footsteps
of real-world technology, because that's what real-world astronauts were already having
to do. On the flip side of things, Ursula K. LeGuin's novel Rocannon's World coined
the concept of an "Ansible", a device that specifically facilitated instant communication
across interstellar distances regardless of lightspeed constraints. This allowed her to
worldbuild a loose interstellar civilization that maintained large-scale communication,
but not small-scale contact on a personal level, so her characters were still mostly
operating in isolation or on a person-to-person scale.
1968 was another big year for sci-fi since it gave us 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was
neat in a lot of ways but for our purposes is only really cool because it showed us what
1968 thought the future of phone booths would look like: a lot like regular phone booths,
but now with video screens. 2001 shows us a brief glimpse of "picturephones" that allowed
for video calls from the orbiting space station down to earth - the character uses a public
picturephone booth for a small fee, but is clearly calling a personal picturephone in
his house. This mirrored a bit of real tech that AT&T would try and fail to launch in
1970, innovatively called the Picturephone - basically a corded phone with a small television
screen on top and presumably a camera built into the chunky top part of the screen. It
was a very popular idea that video calls would be the telecommunication staple of the future,
but the hardware just wasn't where it needed to be to make it commercially viable for general
public use, and of course if the person you were talking to didn't ALSO have a Picturephone
there was really no benefit, so it flopped pretty hard.
1969 was an even bigger year for sci-fi, because it saw the real actual moon landing. This
is a great milestone for humanity overall and an even better milestone for us, because
it involved a whole lot of long- and short-range radio transmissions, it was a huge inspiration
for sci-fi writers, and it highlighted the growing understanding that, on a theoretical
interplanetary scale, radio was a less-than ideal method of communication. Because radio
waves are a form of light, therefore radio was limited by the speed of light, and thus
even just going as far as the moon produced a delay of 1.3 seconds; even the sun's comparatively
short distance of eight light-minutes meant that going that far would make instant audio
communication impossible, and it would prevent mission control from helping the crew in the
event of a time-sensitive crisis. A single transponder was all that was keeping the lunar
module in contact with Mission Control back on earth, and the communication was spotty,
possibly because the computers running the whole thing had less oomph than a TI-84 calculator
- and whenever the command module orbited behind the moon, it lost all radio contact
with earth, because the moon was in the way, temporarily making astronaut Michael Collins
the most isolated human being in the universe. In short, while it was definitely the coolest
thing our species has ever done, it signaled why we'd need to be a lot higher tech before
we could practically speaking get any farther. This would encourage sci-fi writers to develop
spec fic technology that could expand on the current level of communications technology
and account for this weakness, similar to LeGuin's Ansible - something that would allow
for that kind of interstellar communication without that sort of delay.
Amazingly, a pretty good indicator of where communication tech was at in the real world
can be found by watching Columbo, which began in 1968 and technically ran up til 2003. As
the villains of each episode are typically extremely affluent, many of them have access
to real-world cutting-edge technology that's often instrumental to their murder plot and
their eventual capture, making some of these episodes borderline techno-thrillers featuring
everything from an interconnected landline phone system in a government building in 1973's
Candidate for Crime to a cutting edge fax machine in 1990's Agenda for Murder to a high-tech
pager that allowed short texting in 1990's Columbo Cries Wolf - and finally a cell phone
in 1994's Butterfly in Shades of Gray, where Columbo spends the first part of the episode
lamenting his confusion of these newfangled cell phones, and later catches the killer
in a lie when he claims he made a 911 call from the road outside his mountain home, an
area that Columbo confirms has no cell coverage. But for most of the series, communication
is landline-only, and when Columbo needs to make a call he typically just turns up at
the killer's palatial estate and amiably borrows their home phone. Just like in the real world,
even if more advanced options did exist or were being developed somewhere, they weren't
common until the late 90s, and they didn't start infiltrating the way we perceive normalcy
until even later. Another surprisingly useful indicator is,
of all things, D&D. Dungeons and Dragons is a full-on fantasy setting with a very broad
magic system with pretty loose parameters for what is and isn't possible, most of it
based around things players would want to do. And if you're a fan of actual-plays like
Critical Role, Dimension 20, Naddpod *cough* or Rolling With Difficulty, you might've noticed
players using and abusing things like the Sending spell, first introduced in second
edition in 1989 that allows a caster to send a 25-word message to anyone they're familiar
with anywhere in the universe and receive a 25-word response. This sounds relatively
harmless until you remember that this includes people like dramatically absent parents, missing
or captured teammates, the full-on big bad, anyone from the player's tragic backstory
and, you know, anyone they've ever met. Modern actual-players will use this spell and other
similar abilities to stay in touch with each other when the party's split, which is probably
what the spell was originally intended for - and then they'll use it to harass NPCs they
like, to fish for information, to check in to see if someone's still alive, and to overall
make the game world feel remarkably readily accessible, even perhaps a little bit small.
And whenever this happens, there's kind of this vibe, you know? This feeling from the
DM like, well, that's what those spells are for… but somehow I didn't realize it could
be used to solve THAT problem so easily. And if you check earlier editions, it's pretty
clear that "facilitating telecommunication" was not a priority for the designers, or presumably
the players. Its first edition, AD&D, came out in 1978, and I combed through the spell
list looking for anything that would let the players communicate with each other over long
distances. I found three things: the Message spell, which lets a caster whisper a message
that travels in a straight line to the person they're pointing at, so its long distance
applications are very limited; the Magic Mouth spell, which programs an object to grow a
mouth and state an up-to-25-word recorded message when a condition is met; and a DM's-guide-only
ruleset about magic mirrors and crystal balls that allow for one-way scrying, basically
just so the bad guys can spy on the good guys, because AD&D was basically just stealing everything
possible from Lord of the Rings, so of course they wanted to put in palantirs. 1989's AD&D
Second Edition came out six years after the first commercially available cell phone and
added a couple more communication options, like Whispering Wind - which let the caster
send a message to a location, not a person, so basically like calling a landline phone
- Magic Mirror, which let the players get in on that crystal ball scrying action, and
Messenger, which let the caster attach a note to a willing tiny animal. All these methods
of communication were very limited and one-way except for the new fifth-level wizard spell
Sending, which, as mentioned, allowed a 25-word message and response to and from anyone the
caster was familiar with. Since the material component for this spell is literally "two
cans connected by wire" we can safely conclude that this is indeed intended to be the magic-ification
of a garden-variety phone call. Sending stayed on the spell list through editions 3, 3.5,
4 and now 5, with its true potential apparently only being explored recently. It's not like
any old joe can cast it, but it's common enough, long-range enough and difficult enough to
block or intercept that it can undercut a lot of classic dramatic concerns - and it
really seems to me like nobody thought of this application for it until recently. Other
abilities that could do more flexible long-range communication first started appearing in the
early 2000s with 3d edition, like Rary's Telepathic Bond - aka psychic groupchat - sending stones,
magical artifacts that worked like paired walkie-talkies but could only send a 25-word
message once a day - mindlink, a psionic ability that allowed for wordless long-range communication,
and honestly just a whole bunch of other random wacky abilities that can break the game in
new and exciting ways. DND is a very high-magic setting. The potential for this stuff was
always there - but it looks like it only started to make sense for people to use it this way
recently. Heck, now players will even use those artifacts for a lot more communication
than rules as written technically allow for - most parties just use sending stones as
unofficial cell phones now instead of them just casting one 25-word message per day,
which is all it can technically do. And most DMs don't stop them because it just makes
sense for them to work that way. Now the 90s overall seem to have been a slightly
transitionary period for fictional communication tech. Some stories jumped way ahead and made
it really easy, while others seemed a little slower on the uptake. Ghost in the Shell came
out in 1995 and every main character was a cyborg who could effortlessly chat brain-to-brain
with each other across long distances, or use the same abilities to eavesdrop on other
people's shenanigans - which makes sense for a story that's fundamentally exploring the
nature of connection and isolation in relation to humanity. But 1997's The Fifth Element,
set in the 23d century, kept all the phones as functionally landlines despite the receivers
being small, cordless and handheld. It's a running gag in the movie that the protagonist's
mother keeps somehow calling the nearest phone wherever he goes, a joke that only makes sense
if the phones themselves are not portable. That same year, Earth: Final Conflict started
airing, set in the near future - and everyone in that show has a handheld collapsible picturephone,
again just a slight extrapolation into the future where video calling technology would
SURELY sweep the globe. The world was getting more interconnected,
and it was showing through in the stories it made sense to write. But we only really
start noticing that when we compare it to the spec fic that came before, that didn't
have this invisible context - this "normalcy" that was slowly taking form. We wonder why
science fiction writers didn't think of this stuff sooner, because it seems so simple to
us. Of course we can just send a message instantly to anyone we know anywhere in the world, and
of course they can respond as soon as they see it. And if we suddenly can't do that because
of bad internet or no reception or a tech failure, we feel weird and constrained, almost
like a phantom limb - reaching on reflex and finding nothing there.
As one of the youngest millennials, I grew up alongside the last stage of development
of modern computers and the modern internet; when I was very little, computers had successfully
miniaturized beyond giant room size but were still boxy, clacky numbers with almost no
processing power, and the internet was a wild west of CoolMathGames and Nitrome and ICanHasCheezburger
and five million tiny fanfic forums that we were of course not allowed to access in class
and therefore definitely never did - and every few grades the school upgraded to a new set
of computers to work on, starting with those smooth translucent fruity 2000 iMacs and eventually
moving up to those shiny white plastic iBook G3s. My school had policies against kids carrying
those newfangled ipods, no matter if they were the old version with the circular scroll
wheel or the tiny iPod Shuffle with no screen and no buttons - and a couple of the really
fancy kids with really fancy parents even got blackberry phones later in the game. The
iPod Touch and iPhone came out when I was 11 and they completely changed the game - smartphones
were the new hotness, everything was touchscreen or bust and everyone I knew was getting one.
By the time I hit high school the official rules had slackened a little, kind of out
of necessity because at that point almost every kid I knew had a cell phone and a parent
behind them insisting they keep it on them for safety reasons - because it turns out
it's really convenient for a parent to be able to always contact their child! - so the
school ruled that no phones or ipods out in class, but they could be used at lunch or
on break. Meanwhile in the background, cell coverage got broader, screens got higher-res
and much less breakable, social media began to take form and encourage a lot more online
communication. Texting had been integrated into cell phones a while back and was technically
still a thing, but secondary apps for messaging also started popping up all over the place.
Facetime was an unreliable mess at launch, but now that so many people had at least one
device with a camera, a screen and an internet connection, the dream of the picturephone
finally became a reality with easy instant video calls - to which most people said "couldja
maybe just text me instead?" and moved on. RIP the picturephone, died a thousand ignoble
deaths only to be silently and namelessly absorbed into the functionality of every chatroom
that outlived you. Anyway, by the time I went to college, my
friend group that was about to scatter across a half-dozen states had an active groupchat
that kept us in contact and semi-regular video calls all four years. I almost can't imagine
how I would've handled the transition without that. The narrative of "going off to college"
that we'd all heard was so centered on leaving home and being alone and, in the more depressing
cases, losing contact with your old friends, and with the connectedness we'd all gotten
accustomed to, just… none of that happened. Heck, when the pandemic hit in 2020 I think
everyone was a little surprised how readily the tech we'd built up facilitated things
like working from home and distance learning and just keeping in contact with friends and
family. But it also highlighted how physically distant a lot of us were from our close friends
now - how much we'd been relying on that telecom stuff to stay in constant contact between
visits ANYWAY, but at the same time how unexpectedly tough it was to handle when we had to rely
on telecommunication stuff for all our socialization. This level of interconnectedness became normal
without anyone really noticing, but then we were surprised to notice how much it had changed
- some of the things that we were expecting to be problems, that we were bracing for out
of habit, had been quietly fixed just by the shape of the world changing in a way that
left us almost unable to conceive of any other way things could be.
Fiction is a mirror of reality. It's not intended that way, and that's certainly not all it
is, but one of the many things it provides is insight into the things that the author
couldn't see, that they regarded as ubiquitous or invisible or, bluntly, normal. And when
we live through a change in what normal is, one of the ways we can most easily notice
this is in how old works of fiction start hitting different. Our normal has diverged
from their normal, and this shows through in the invisible things - the things the characters
don't think of, the principles they don't question, the problems they don't solve, the
applications for existing concepts they don't use. Even when writers construct far-off fantasy
worlds with completely different rules, or when they explicitly speculate about the future
of science and technology that could grow out of our own, there are concepts that are
normal to them - concepts that are dependent on their highly specific circumstances and
lives - that they can't see. I made a ton of statements in this video that are strictly
based on my life experience and how my personal perception of normal was shifted by the gradual
change in the tech I grew up with. But I grew up in a big city in the US and went to private
schools whose clientele skewed affluent, and I regularly saw the cutting edge of tech become
mainstream in my community within a few years of its invention. And nowadays my work 100%
centers on putting stuff online, and some of my closest friends live halfway around
the world. I spend a lot of time texting people and I've personally gotten very used to doing
the bulk of my communication online. My experience is nowhere near universal, and my "normal"
is probably a lot more online than some of yours.
But regardless of my many biases that I can only do so much to compensate for when writing
this script, this overall shift in the space of fiction is very real and very noticeable.
Stories have been incorporating more and more telecommunication magitech and making it more
and more accessible for its characters. The level of interconnectivity we now think of
as "normal" is starting to seep into the invisible substrate of fictional normalcy, and because
of how central the concept of communication is in fiction, it is changing a lot of stuff.
And even if it doesn't stick out too much, we still notice. It itches in our brain a
little, not because it's out of place, but because it's too in place. It makes sense
to us that our characters should be able to reach each other the way we can reach each
other. It only feels a little bit weird because we're not used to seeing it, and that maybe
makes us wonder WHY we're not used to seeing it. We're used to cracking jokes about how
"this plot would've never happened if the heroes had cell phones" or "god forbid anyone
call 911" etcetera etcetera. It's slowly becoming more and more widespread precisely because
it's becoming harder and harder to notice. I started writing this script because I caught
myself doing this in my own work without thinking! I invented a simple magical message network
and gave my protagonists access to it, because it made sense for it to exist and be fairly
readily available considering the worldbuilding I'd already established, and why not do it,
right? It'd make a lot of plot points easier for me to arrange! And then I realized that,
without even thinking about it, I'd made it a lot harder for myself to write a ton of
those nice, comfortable, tropey plots that rely on the characters being out of communication!
And then I started questioning where this disconnect in my creativity had come from
- why it was so easy for me to create this plot device without even thinking about it,
and only then noticing the enormous consequences of introducing that level of interconnectivity
into my otherwise largely low-tech fantasy setting drawn from all my most beloved fantasy
tropes that were invented back when the cordless telephone was science fiction! This is so
weird to me! I didn't want this script to be twice as long as my usual ones but I couldn't
get this out of my head! And this is just the main rabbit hole - the fact that social
and technological norms invisibly infiltrate the fiction of its era, even if that fictional
setting is completely divorced from reality, is a HUGELY interesting space of analysis
at the root of everything from tokenized stereotypes to "media aging poorly" to how storytelling
has always been intrinsically political to about half the arguments of death of the author.
And because we lose sight of what defines "normal" as it becomes invisible to us from
overexposure, it can be a bit shocking when we catch sight of something in the mirror
of fiction that's shifted without our noticing - something that we've lost context for, or
something that's taken on new meaning from real-world developments, or something we're
used to seeing handled or solved in a way that didn't exist when it was written. The
world changes, we change, and because normalcy is entirely relative we don't always realize
how much things have changed until we catch a glimpse of what's become invisible to us.
Because we're always on those dang phones, you know?
*laughs* Ah, god. I'm sorry.
So………… yeah!
