Virtual Living by Motte Brown on 10/11/2006 at 4:05 PM

In a featured column on Slate.com, (warning: link contains vulgarity) two novelists -- Walter Kirn and Gary Shteyngart -- correspond on how today's "age of connectivity" has affected storytelling. Walter writes:

Too much happens each day, it happens all at once, and yet, in some ways, nothing happens at all. A day that's spent processing electronic signals like a sort of lonely arctic radar station (my day, your day, a lot of ours) is hard to dramatize....

Our new problem ... is that life no longer resembles a story. Events intersect but don't progress. People interact but don't make contact. Settings shift but don't necessarily change.

Gary responds:

The questions may well be: Who has the patience and inclination to read these (often lengthy) works, when so many Americans are already involved in their own electronic, Wikipedian journeys? And in a society driven by selfishness and the need to stand out on the false bright stage of reality television or on the pulsating Nintendo or MySpace screen, who has the empathy to travel into another person's mind? Who wants to engage in another's misery without the cloying redemption of a talk-show host's conclusive two-minute "It's all gonna get better, child"? Who wants to learn about some distant society's pain when there's no possibility of moving the cursor onto the dancing penguin in the corner and clicking onto a brighter, newer, safer reality?

Hopefully, as Suzanne speculates in her post Weary of Being Wired, today's digital natives are realizing the superficiality of their tech-based lives and will seek out more meaningful interaction. All of our lives, as well as our novels, will be bettor for it.

Virtual Living by Motte Brown on 10/11/2006 at 4:05 PM

In a featured column on Slate.com, (warning: link contains vulgarity) two novelists -- Walter Kirn and Gary Shteyngart -- correspond on how today's "age of connectivity" has affected storytelling. Walter writes:

Too much happens each day, it happens all at once, and yet, in some ways, nothing happens at all. A day that's spent processing electronic signals like a sort of lonely arctic radar station (my day, your day, a lot of ours) is hard to dramatize....

Our new problem ... is that life no longer resembles a story. Events intersect but don't progress. People interact but don't make contact. Settings shift but don't necessarily change.

Gary responds:

The questions may well be: Who has the patience and inclination to read these (often lengthy) works, when so many Americans are already involved in their own electronic, Wikipedian journeys? And in a society driven by selfishness and the need to stand out on the false bright stage of reality television or on the pulsating Nintendo or MySpace screen, who has the empathy to travel into another person's mind? Who wants to engage in another's misery without the cloying redemption of a talk-show host's conclusive two-minute "It's all gonna get better, child"? Who wants to learn about some distant society's pain when there's no possibility of moving the cursor onto the dancing penguin in the corner and clicking onto a brighter, newer, safer reality?

Hopefully, as Suzanne speculates in her post Weary of Being Wired, today's digital natives are realizing the superficiality of their tech-based lives and will seek out more meaningful interaction. All of our lives, as well as our novels, will be bettor for it.