has anyone ever written a good phone novel

[ghost]

as in a novel where the fundamental problem is conveying and reasoning about the kind of experience that people have in phone-life

not in a limp way like "distraction" or "texting my friends" but in a way that conveys the gargantuan quality of it—of being part of an online system of consciousness and knowledge production that asks things of you in an arbitrary way, that you can surf like a wave if you're smart and obsessive and unemployed enough

to me this is the defining phenomenonology of our age and so far the consensus of people i've asked is "nah nobody's done it yet, nothing close"

 

[shakahislop]

no one is talking about this is more or less along these lines although more internet than phone-specific and i remember it being pretty good

 

[sus]

No

No one ever wrote that book for television either though. People will say IJ but being about television isn't the same thing

 

[sus]

What sorts of phenomenological experience would you want captured? What you have is a good start but is there more?

 

[Clinamenic]

What sorts of phenomenological experience would you want captured? What you have is a good start but is there more?

Could maybe have to be with having your attention divided among several overlapping asynchronous exchanges, without people being as truly present, or rather their presence is felt as more of a distribution across channels than as something solitary and coherent? That said, I don't think I've read anything that really captures that,

 

[version]

Gibson's Pattern Recognition makes a good go of integrating the internet, specifically forums and email, into the novel.

 

[Clinamenic]

Phenomenologically its like one is being internally differentiated at faster rates than before, and exposed to an ever-increasing volume of possible world-models and contexts and rubrics. Lately I've been thinking about this in terms of internal family systems

Internal Family Systems Model - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[pattycakes]

Welles would have captured it well in film with his overlapping fast edit cut up style

 

[Corpsey]

Image 'Ulysses' but Stephen has a smart phone

 

[shiels]

No

No one ever wrote that book for television either though. People will say IJ but being about television isn't the same thing

No it doesn’t really capture the actual experience of TV, more takes it’s damaging or addictive effects to a bizarre conclusion and uses that as maguffin.

Good example because I think it’s difficult to represent newer media within older forms and I’m not sure it’s always worth trying too hard. Phone life is also oddly missing from film and TV but when you see some attempts to embed it you understand why, the flux and processing speed is too difficult and strange to capture within slower fixed frames in the same way that dreams, psychedelic experiences and club nights will always come across clunky in literature and film

 

[shiels]

Texts are increasingly featured in new novels - can’t remember who but a writer saying if she flicked through a new book and it had no texts / messages it wasn’t worth it

 

[Corpsey]

I used to like Patricia Lockwood's articles in the LRB but over time I became steadily more irritated by her snarky style

That said, I remember reading about this novel which is supposedly about the internet

No One Is Talking About This

A book that asks: Is there life after the internet? A…

www.goodreads.com

 

[Corpsey]

I suppose in a modern Dickens novel, for example, the melodramatic action would be advanced at least partly through the internet—conversations on whatsapp (an accidental invite to a secret group!), the psychodrama of hearts on instagram (accidentally liking a post!)...

There has to be some sort of action in a novel, doesn't there? (Unless it's a niche avant garde sort of thing.) It can't just be what goes through a man's mind when he's doomscrolling on the toilet.

People talk about how smartphones have ruined many typical horror film/film plots. You can just google or phone your way out of situations. But the internet is presumably creating a lot of dramatic situations too.

 

[pattycakes]

A thought that passes through the back of my mind fairly often is that if I was to write songs I would avoid any references to modern tech which by nature has a short shelf life.
Because that would date the lyrics pretty quickly. You hear it in certain pop tunes now. Little references to various current epherma like iPhones or IG and you know they've put it there because it triggers a little pavlovian recognition response in the listener. Always feels a bit lazy and lame imo

 

[yyaldrin]

No it doesn’t really capture the actual experience of TV, more takes it’s damaging or addictive effects to a bizarre conclusion and uses that as maguffin.

Good example because I think it’s difficult to represent newer media within older forms and I’m not sure it’s always worth trying too hard. Phone life is also oddly missing from film and TV but when you see some attempts to embed it you understand why, the flux and processing speed is too difficult and strange to capture within slower fixed frames in the same way that dreams, psychedelic experiences and club nights will always come across clunky in literature and film

there is a surpisingly good movie called "searching" that entirely takes place on a computer screen.

 

[pattycakes]

A thought that passes through the back of my mind fairly often is that if I was to write songs I would avoid any references to modern tech which by nature has a short shelf life.
Because that would date the lyrics pretty quickly. You hear it in certain pop tunes now. Little references to various current epherma like iPhones or IG and you know they've put it there because it triggers a little pavlovian recognition response in the listener. Always feels a bit lazy and lame imo

Just saw one of these about ghosting. Shits so cringe

 

[okzharp]

no one is talking about this is more or less along these lines although more internet than phone-specific and i remember it being pretty good

that was the first book i thought of too, noisy little novel but enjoyed it

 

[jenks]

Not a novel but a non fiction account of her commute - all written on her iphone notes app https://www.laurenelkin.com/9192

 

[shakahislop]

Not a novel but a non fiction account of her commute - all written on her iphone notes app https://www.laurenelkin.com/9192

i read this one and didn't get much out of it. it was a while ago but from what i can remember it was that second tier of autofiction where she doesn't quite have the eye to pull it off. i've read quite a few like that. maybe its not technically autofiction actually but feels like part of the same thing. really it's only rachel cusk and ben lerner (of what i've read) who have enough to say about the world to make this kind of thing worth it. with rachel cusk she just has absolutely amazing prose. this incredible descriptive style and clear way of seeing the world. she kind of leverages this coldness that i think is somewhere in her character into clarity. with ben lerner it's just very relatable.

something like the bus book didn't have either of those characteristics from what i can remember. at that point it can be a bit aggravating because it's harder to overlook the self-indulgence of it, the class nature of it and so on.

 

[version]

I've had this on the to-read list for a while, might be of interest.

Fragments of an Infinite Memory

“One day, as I was daydreaming on the boulevard Beaumarchais, I had the idea—it came and went in a flash, almost in spite of myself—of Googling to find out what I’d been up to and where I’d been two evenings before, at five o’clock, since I couldn’t remember on my own.” So begins Maël Renouard’s...

www.nyrb.com