Fiction and Technology

A thought on the frequent difficulty of accomodating contemporary technology into mainstream fiction. I'm not talking about SciFi here, I'm talking about the everyday stories, the classic plots, adapting to the availabilty of technology.

In many ways, Sarah Schulman was brilliantly presceint in saying, "Everything was getting computerized by the summer of '84, and it was happening so fast, a social critic could hardly keep up with it. Lila was having a hard time building a plot around a WANG word processor" (Schulman 250).

On the plane from Toronto, I was so mentally fried that I succombed to the temptation to watch the in-flight movie, Must Love Dogs. I love Diane Lane and I love John Cussak, so this movie did have some things going for it. But awareness of technology was not one of them. It was an entire movie about internet dating, and yet none of the characters seemed to own a cell phone. Not once or even twice but several times the plot revolved entirely around people showing up at other people's houses without calling first; who does that? It seems unbearably rude to me. The people writing, directing, and performing in these movies must know that this technology exists, why can't they figure out how to use it properly? Get around the awkwardness and the tired old plot devices and think about the way we live now!