Social Media's Influence on the Novel

The article takes the proposition that social media has changed people. I think it's just reduced borders--you can have interactions with folks in Nepal that you can also have with folks face-to-face. There is some value in writing about those interactions, as there has always been, but I don't think it's a big enough change to necessitate a new language or a new kind of story. (Gossip, falsehood, and backstabbing have always been a part of human interaction.)

 

I buy the proposition that social media has changed us, but in many ways that aren't yet apparent. If something changes in the environment, people change because of it, I think it is unavoidable. The trick is that we're all fish in the fishtank, it isn't easy to sit outside and look in.

One obvious example - political correctness. Social media bubbles criticism of people's work right to the top. Today's writer is acutely aware of what people will perceive as offensive. That changes our self-consciousness, it changes how we go about writing, what words we put on the page.

Writers in the past did not have to face the same near-global criticism of their work. We get a sense that the whole world is watching... and judging. That produces different fiction. I think it produces different characters. I'm not saying it is good or bad, or any such thing, but I don't think we can toss it out.