{"id":17858,"date":"2014-01-09T17:15:44","date_gmt":"2014-01-09T21:15:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=17858"},"modified":"2014-01-09T17:15:44","modified_gmt":"2014-01-09T21:15:44","slug":"enhance-ugly-websites-flip-phones-and-the-trouble-with-technology-in-storytelling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2014\/01\/09\/enhance-ugly-websites-flip-phones-and-the-trouble-with-technology-in-storytelling\/","title":{"rendered":"Enhance! Ugly Websites, Flip Phones, and the Trouble With Technology in Storytelling."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The
The plot of Scream is impossible without cordless phones.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Children of Men Clive Owen\u2019s character Theo is trying to secure \u201ctransfer papers\u201d from his cousin Nigel who seems to be one of the few rich people left in the no-one-can-make-babies-anymore-dystopia. The two older men are sitting at a dining table with a younger boy, presumably Nigel\u2019s son, who seems to be inflicted in some way. He\u2019s pale and stares vacantly at somewhere just past his left hand which is eerily still in between the twitches of fingers that are adorned by delicate wires. He doesn\u2019t respond to others in the room and isn\u2019t eating the food in front of him. After Nigel yells at him to take his pill we notice that they boy isn\u2019t really sick or particularly disturbed, he\u2019s playing a game attached to his hand.<\/p>\n

In the original P.D. James book of the same name (highly recommend!) that scene never took place but you do learn more about the last and youngest generation to be born: the Omegas. \u201cNo generation has been more studied, more examined, more agonized over, more valued or more indulged\u2026.Men and women, the Omegas are a race apart, indulged, propitiated, feared, regarded with a half-superstitious awe. In some countries, so we are told, they are ritually sacrificed in fertility rites resurrected after centuries of superficial civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a genre, science fiction and fantasy are prime avenues for sociotechnical critique. In the moments before we know he\u2019s playing a game the audience sees Nigel\u2019s son as Nigel sees him: Disengaged from those around him, the thing that has monopolized his attention is incomprehensible to the point that we are unable to understand why it is so captivating. You can just imagine the countless Dad jokes that happened in parking lots after that movie let out. (\u201cThat\u2019s what \u00a0you\u2019re like when you\u2019re on the GameBoy!\u201d) In addition to being prime avenues for such critique, many writers explicitly employ the narrative tropes and tools of the genre specifically and consciously to engage in that criticism; \u201csociological\u201d science fiction is not the end-all-be-all of SF&F, but it\u2019s a major player and it has a very long history. From Heinlein and Asimov to LeGuin and Delaney to Gibson and Atwood, even the most sciency stuff has usually had some form of social component. These aren\u2019t just narrative tools; they\u2019re thinking tools, established ways of working through the implications of something, of setting up thought experiments. When one is used to engaging in varying degrees of worldbuilding, it\u2019s easier to take the existing world and tweak its settings to see what happens.<\/p>\n

But as William Gibson – and many others – have pointed out, the world in which we live is now explicitly science fictional in a lot of ways. To the extent that writers in books, movies, and TV used to imagine the future, we\u2019re living in it right now. This has implications for how writers engage in futurism; it also has implications for how writers working with contemporary settings make use of all the different ways in which people make use of digital technology.<\/p>\n

Strange, therefore, that so many writers are so goddamn bad at it. Like, really laughably terrible. What gives?<\/p>\n

Of course there\u2019s the ubiquitous \u201cenhance\u201d<\/a> \u00a0TV trope where someone stands behind another person seated at a computer and tells them to zoom in to grainy camera footage to find the killer\u2019s face in the reflection of the coffee cup sitting on the table. That stuff always comes off as lazy writing, but it seems like there\u2019s some willful ignorance at work too. When entire shows refuse to acknowledge the existence of smartphones or social media it looks downright bizarre.<\/p>\n

\"Scene
Scene from The Killing where the police find a teenager’s Super 8 home movie. In 2012.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Killing, a crime drama set in 2011 Seattle, is full of phone conversations\u2026 on flip phones. In one of the few instances where a smartphone is mentioned (again, this is set in Seattle) both on screen characters agree they\u2019ll never buy one because \u201cI\u2019ve seen what they do to my son.\u201d Sometimes these phones can take what look to be low light, high motion HD footage, in other instances their grainy still photos \u201caren\u2019t enough to go on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also, where were iPhones in Breaking Bad? Why does savewalterwhite.com<\/a> look like some Geocities site from 1997?<\/p>\n

Part of the reason movies and TV do such a poor job is because its difficult to portray social action that flits from Facebook, to text messages, to face-to-face contact and back again. Also, no prop designer wants to spend their limited funds and time on procuring smartphones and designing fake interfaces that steer clear of trademarked corporate brands. Especially if they\u2019re only going to get a grand total of 20 seconds of screen time. Perhaps that\u2019s why a lot of the code you see on TV are copied and pasted from a website\u2019s source code<\/a> or Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But groundbreaking shows like Sherlock<\/a> have found ways to portray conversation without an over-the-shoulder shot of a computer screen, and weave text messages with face-to-face conversations in a provocative way. The difficulty here, and something that Sherlock largely gets right, is that smartphones or blogs are neither deus ex machinas nor window dressing. In the aggregate these inventions change social norms and have a big impact on what characters are and are not capable of in a scene, but they don\u2019t necessarily have to drive the plot or become non-existent. They just are.<\/p>\n

Horror movies seem to have it uniquely bad. You can\u2019t make a character vulnerable if friends or the police are a phone call away. Writing around cell phones can be as simple and rote as \u201cI don\u2019t have signal in this abandoned mental hospital\u201d to more complex narratives where the technological devices themselves are implicated in the suspense (i.e. The Ring, Scream, V\/H\/S, or Grave Encounters). But like science fiction and fantasy, horror movies are all about \u201cwhat ifs\u201d and paying close attention to the ways human relationships are mediated, controlled, and afforded. Just like the video game in Children of Men, horror movie writers rely on the expected technological literacy of their audience. The author can play with the expected capabilities of a technology, the recognizability of the device on screen, and\/or the social norms associated with the object on screen to elicit surprise, fear, or foreboding.<\/p>\n

\"well-the-resolutions-too-poor-it-wont-help-much-to-enhance-it\"
The first and last time a TV show understood how digital images work.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Some of this is probably the newness of this kind of technologically mediated interaction and experience of reality. Sometimes the imagination of creative people leaps forward, but often the practical aspects of it lag; imagining the future can sometimes be a great deal easier than dealing with the present simply because one is freed of the pressure to get it right and just have fun worldbuilding. Writers might use smartphones and write their stuff on laptops and tablets and collaborate via the internet and social media, but writers learn how to write in part from other writers, and a lot of the writing out there just doesn\u2019t deal with this stuff. There is, as yet, no well-established toolkit, though we all know how to deal with phones and letters in the simplest of terms. But phones and letters don\u2019t require the dramatic adjustments in a writer\u2019s understanding of how interaction works now. It\u2019s not that they\u2019re completely new, and there are things to build on, but for a writer working from an already limited toolkit, they\u2019re just new enough.<\/p>\n

But also, as Sarah\u2019s written before,<\/a> some of it is sheer laziness and\/or an assumption that this stuff is neither terribly important nor terribly interesting. As fiction writer Toby Litt put it in an essay on \u201cThe Reader and Technology\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I don\u2019t want to overemphasize this. You could imagine a similar anxiety over how the telephone would undermine fiction. Perhaps it is just a matter of acceleration. But I don\u2019t think I am alone in already being weary of characters who make their great discoveries whilst sitting in front of a computer screen. If for example a character, by diligent online research and persistent emailing, finds out one day \u2013 after a ping in their inbox \u2013 who their father really is, isn\u2019t that a story hardly worth telling? Watching someone at a computer is dull. Watching someone play even the most exciting computer game is dull. You, reading this now, are not something any writer would want to write about for more than a sentence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Dude. Dude.<\/p>\n

So what to do about this? The problem – or aspects of the problem – isn\u2019t all that hard to diagnose, but with a problem that\u2019s still taking form and manifesting in ways that we can see, a solution is a little harder to come by. Probably the best thing that can be said is that, again, there are media out there that are getting it right, or at least getting it closer to right than most other people. If writers write what they know – often what they see others doing – the toolkit will naturally expand on its own, and what we\u2019ll see will be a process of growth in how stories are told, which is a natural thing that\u2019s occurred many times in the long, long past. Some of it will also simply come from the next generation of creative types, who have far more familiarity with the day-to-day realities of this kind of experience than older generations of writers. Storytelling is always evolving, and what we\u2019re seeing right now is a new stage in that evolution.<\/p>\n

Until then, we\u2019ll just have to endure some really, really poorly done technology.<\/p>\n

Sarah and David have breached the system, are hacking code, and enhancing photos on twitter at @dynamicsymmetry<\/a> and @da_banks<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why are there so many bad depictions of technology in TV and film? Is it laziness or a misunderstanding of how devices exist in our lives?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1512,"featured_media":17862,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[26450,760,12719,14071,10356,18544,18493,12856,14020,3488,732,26524,3542,12693,1103],"class_list":["post-17858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","tag-camera","tag-cell-phones","tag-dystopia","tag-fantasy","tag-futurism","tag-interaction","tag-message","tag-narrative","tag-sherlock","tag-smartphone","tag-social-media","tag-social-norms","tag-storytelling","tag-tropes","tag-william-gibson"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2014\/01\/scream-drew-barrymore-GC.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1512"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17858"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17865,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17858\/revisions\/17865"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}