Friday, October 15, 2010

Facebook Stalkers in Contemporary Fiction

Joanne McNeil at the Huffington Post asks Where Are the iPhone Addicts and Facebook 'Stalkers' in Contemporary Fiction?

Hey, it's true. Stalkers and killers and all those fun people in books would be using social media to track people down, right? It'd make their jobs easier.

My guess would be that writers don't want to make their work dated. Are people going to know what Facebook was twenty years from now? Thirty? Fifty? It's not so much of a problem for most books, but you never know what's going to turn into a classic, cult or otherwise.

Cell phones became a problem in horror movies, too. Why couldn't the people just phone for help? So movies started having to write in reasons why cell phones wouldn't work or have the protagonist lose theirs or run out of battery power. They also use all those excuses in books now.

Let's not even start on the portrayal of the internet.

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