Wireless Narrative
So, I don’t like Star Trek (though might see the new film…) … but always had to admire the way it got on with a narrative.
“Sir!” says Spock, staring into a blinky blinky screen, “I can see from my read out that we are orbitting above a planet of Earth-like qualities, resembling, in fact, no more and no less than a studio lot with some concrete rocks in it and a pink backdrop. On this planet are human-like creatures except that once every year they sacrifice an alien wanderer to their gods in a sexually charged ritual of exhaustive pain and anxiety, and this year it looks like there’s trouble.”
“Wow!” says Kirk. “Let’s beam down into the middle of that!”
The creators of Star Trek envisaged all sorts of things for their future. Teleportation, faster than light travel – guns that seem to have an uncanny ability to knock a man unconscious wherever they hit him, or kill him stone dead wherever they hit him, UNLESS that character is a leading actor in which case he/she/it will usually only be mildly mauled. What they didn’t envisage, however, was wireless internet.
“Hey – Spock! So we’re down on the surface of the planet and there’s this strange lumpy formation ahead of us. What do you think it is?”
“Just give me a moment, Captain, let me take a photo of it with my iTricorder. Just looking for a network… running a bit slow… okay… that is the rock of epic judgment which, if a visiting stranger climbs it and declares three times from its peak ‘Try to react positively to the world around you’ all things will be made better immediately.”
“Wow!” exclaims Kirk again. “If you didn’t have your iTricorder enabled for interplanetary roaming, it might have taken us 45 minutes and a lot of angst to work that out! I guess we can just go home now.”
Wireless internet hasn’t just changed the world, it’s changed the nature of narrative. Mostly, it’s made it faster. Want to find something out? Pop on a computer. Want to contact someone on the other side of the planet? Send an email. Want to do a background check on a shifty looking sort without leaving the crime scene? Roll on google and the pdf. No longer are pages spent on going to the library or waiting for the one bit of data without which the entire thing makes no sense. Instant access – instant gratification.
Internet has also, I’d argue, changed what writers write about. It’s not merely that our plots now contain mobile phones and email; it’s that at a click of a button I can bring up images of Belgrade and Beijing on my computer. I can zoom into streetview in New York and get a complete history of the Taj Mahal without ever leaving my desk; without even closing my novel. The world really is my oyster, although whether that makes the quality of writing any better, I really couldn’t say…
