Plots that will disappear thanks to modern technology

[hackmum]

There's a well-worn plot in which a man and a woman have a relationship, fall in love and are then forced by circumstance to part. Years go by in which they marry other people or imagine the other person is dead or whatever - in any case, they don't see each other again until one of them is on their death bed.

I've just read a novel by a famous literary novelist (who should know better, imho) that has exactly this plot. It finishes in the 1980s.

With the internet, that sort of plot will just disappear, won't it? You lose track of someone, you look them on Facebook or LinkedIn and if you feel like it you get in touch with them.

Are there any other plots you reckon will disappear thanks to the advent of the internet, mobile phones etc?

Slightly side tracking, but I was saying to DH the other night that when I read older crime fiction (pre 1980's) I always think that things could have turned out very differently had the detective had a mobile!

Yes, that's very much the kind of thing I'm thinking of, magimedi. Romeo and Juliet, for starters, would have had a much happier outcome if Juliet could have just texted the plan to Romeo.

Romeo and Juliet would have been so different. Given sexting, Skype, fb, Instagram, texting....

Imagine the famous 5 with drones instead of running all over to catch villans? Far safer.

Bonfire of vanities - never would have happened if he had a mobile.

The famous 5 would never actually meet in person. They would have all their adventures in a virtual world.

Of course the famous 5 would meet. Julian, Ann(e?) and the middle one get dumped on cousin George whilst their parents swan off somewhere for a holiday in the beginning of the books. That shouldn't have to change, except of course it would all be booked online and childcare sorted out via text messages.

I think most of what the pupils get up to in the Jennings books would be ruled out by risk assessments and safeguarding rules. That and the fact that I don't suppose there's many 7 year olds at boarding school these days!

Sorry, just realised that's not really technology!

The Go Between (which I watched last night, years after I read the book) is another one - today they wouldn't have needed Leo to convey the messages, they'd have just texted each other on PAYG mobile phones. (Mind you, today, nobody'd have cared if they were having sex and nobody would have been that bothered whether Marion married Hugh or not, so the whole thing is very much fixed to a particular point in time.)

I did hear someone on Radio 4 talking about a book where a teenage girl had made her way out of Nazi occupied Europe, and it was said that with modern technology she would have been caught in an hour by Nazis either following the noise of her texting or by reading her twitter/facebook updates.

Any plot that requires someone to be lost sort of falls apart with a GPS enabled phone and google maps.

Any plot that required the hero to send his assistant off to get help dies with the mobile.

The Woman in White

They could have checked Laura's identity with DNA, and found out WHEN she left for London from her cell phone records.

It's a shame really that so much good fiction written in the 1990s or earlier is now dated.
I love Robert B Parker's Spenser series. I love them but they feel as though they were written a hundred years ago.

Most of the Bronte & Austen books would be rendered impossible by modern technology.

Lydia & Wickham would never have been able to elope - she would have tweeted blow-by-blow accounts of the whole of their flirtation before it ever became a sordid affair & been discovered long before it ever came to fruition.

Emma - I actually think that Facebook etc would have made Emma's matchmaking tendancies worse, and her more inclined to see love and flirtation between her contemporaries, and encourage it as she did in the book.

Persuasion - they would have just sorted it out ages ago. Seriously.

Villette - whoever heard of anyone these days randomly travelling abroad & being hired as a teacher after waiting on the doorstep... you'd phone ahead & find employment.

Tess would have been able to get an abortion after being raped.