Technology And The Proverbial Simple Life

The NYT came out with a wrong-headed editorial today, bemoaning the difficulty of creating believable fictional situations in which two characters lose contact with, or misunderstand, each other:

Certainly Rick Blaine would have been spared the aching uncertainty of why Ilsa stood him up at the train station in “Casablance.” (Why didn’t she show up? We were supposed to run away together! Hmm, let me check my messages…O.K., well, that makes sense. Now let’s see if I can find her on Google Earth…).

But this is a gross oversimplification. Modern life is still chock full of miscommunications, misunderstandings, and missed connections. But they don’t happen because we don’t have enough information. They happen because we have much more than we need.

Emails get erroneously marked as spam and deleted. Text messages get sent from an unknown number, and therefore get misinterpreted or ignored. Phones get lost or stolen. Voicemails get garbled by ambient noise, or deleted before the listener has heard them in their entirety. And there are typos, and messages sent to the wrong person. Attachments not included. Meaning misinterpreted based on lack of context.

That’s why, despite the miracles of modern technology, we are not all living in a peaceful utopia right now.

It’s true that the changes in the ways people communicate in the modern world has an effect on the way fiction is written.

But…well, tough. Solutions to that problem can be found in reality, where there is still plenty of regret, anguish, and loss, much of it still theoretically avoidable.

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