Ubiquitous cell phones are definitely a revolutionary development. This becomes obvious when you read or watch fiction of any sort. How many story lines would be completely disrupted by the presence of a cell phone? As it turns out, a great many, even for stories being written today, as many writers haven't fully absorbed the way things have changed.
This drives me nuts whenever I read anything by Connie Willis. Her time travel books play (partly, obviously) decades in the future yet there are constantly people running around and frantically looking for each other and not finding anyone. I always want to scream “Pick up your goddamn cellphone!” (Some of those were written in the nineties which explains their lack of cellphones but even her most recent books from this year have the same problem.)
It's weird that the lack of portable phones requires more suspension of disbelief than time travel. Maybe that's a testament to the writer. In Doomsday Book there are a few plot points where even an answering machine would have helped.
Pity the poor artist who establishes their reputation in one medium, then sees the medium do a big shift.
Willis probably could write books which fully encompass the cellphone-era worldview. But will they be Connie Willis books? Or will the loss of all those old tropes make her new style inevitably different from her best-selling old style?
Think of PG Wodehouse, blithely writing novels set in early-twentieth-century England as late as 1975. (Though this example is a bit contrived, since some would argue that Wodehouse wrote about a society that never existed.) Or Bach, plugging away on his late Baroque masterworks years after the Baroque went out of style.
Of course! In fact, I just discovered that The Art of the Fugue, which I believe Bach wrote toward the end of his career, really does sound better to me than his earlier stuff. Good for him for plugging stubbornly on in the genre he had mastered and which he knew best.
I feel like the situation is even more extreme in a sense. It seems like ubiquitous information disrupts a large percentage of all possible story plots.
Most story plots hinge on ignorance and discovery. With no physical personification of ignorance, a plot is simply less compelling.
Imagine -
* Odysseus travels through exotic, distant lands, that he just forget to do Google earth on beforehand, * Why wait for Godot when you can just give him a call? * etc.
The Orange ads are more about clueless producers ruining film ideas with rampant commercialism. I don't think there have been any Orange ads where a plot has been ruined due to the presence of a phone within the movie itself.
Haha yes, even Star Trek, they can travel at warp speed but the away team can't send an MMS back to the ship, the captain has to beam down personally and see for himself...
This is even sillier in the case of Star Trek since they could use even a Polaroid or film camera and beam the film/photos back up to the ship (or, of course, a data crystal or what-have-you).
The ironic thing about Star Trek (and part of what makes it so kitschy-great) is that you don't suspend disbelief about the future tech on the show; you suspend disbelief about the lack of present-day tech on the show. GPS, for starters, to say nothing of SMS, MMS, etc.
It's best not to think too hard about why a society capable of telling you from orbit precisely how many lifeforms inhabit a planet is incapable of telling you exactly where their captain is when his badge is removed.
You're forgetting that in those cases, beaming down was a result not of lack of video, but because of interference, or the classic "You have to see this for yourself" bit. More importantly, it made for a better show that way.
Interstellar video was common enough, but I'd question the importance of having video conferencing on top of their voice only communicators. I'd go further, but then I'd be showing how much time I've wasted thinking about this.
I seem to recall at least one episode where they showed the image of the person being communicated with in the communicator. Am I just imagining this? Or was it in one of the movie versions…?
