I think I’m out of step with the world. The things that many people value, that they pin their hopes on, just don’t interest me. (And vice versa.) I’m sure this was probably always true, but now there are physical manifestations to constantly alert me of this situation, like people tearing through their Facebook accounts on smartphones in every coffee shop and park. But I don’t think this narcissism and self-interest and illusion should pose problems for fiction writers, except if they’re trying to observe a world that doesn’t exist anymore in a way that likewise doesn’t exist anymore. But not everyone agrees. From Damien Walter at the Guardian:

“Walk in to any public space today, from a waiting room to a coffee shop, and note the disturbing absence of voices. We are there, and we are elsewhere. Our discussions are mediated via social networks, and conducted through touchscreen interfaces. Can we call them friends, this network of professional and social contacts we interact with through computers?

Journalist and chronicler of hacker culture Quinn Norton describes an aesthetic crisis in writing ‘(H)ow do we write emotionally of scenes involving computers? How do we make concrete, or at least reconstructable in the minds of our readers, the terrible, true passions that cross telephony lines?’ In a digital world do falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms all look the same? Do they all look like typing?”