Art Imitating Life
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Social Media & the Literary Experience
I’m reading a novel called Wildcat about a new mother and a fallout with her close friend. The story line feels very contemporary: vaccine hesitancy, influencers, mom trends. Another aspect of the story that makes it very “of the moment” is the fact that a lot of the plot points happen around social media. The main character essentially steals the password to her friend’s Instagram account and shenanigans ensue.
For someone who tries (and fails) to avoid social media in my own life, it makes me cringe to see the ways that social media plays out in the lives of literary characters. And yet, it makes perfect sense. We live so much of our contemporary lives on social media; it would only make sense that this would be the case for fictional characters, as well.
I guess I wish it weren’t the reality, and so when I see that reality spelled out for me in black and white, it makes me feel a bit sad. (References to social media happen all the time in pop songs, but that doesn’t seem to bother me as much…)
The truth is, social media is where our humanness gets played out – the high drama, the low-stakes banter, the pandering, the envy, the boastfulness. The little things and the big things. The frailties of the ego. They all take the stage on one platform or another.
I wrote a young adult novel and I was going to say that I set it in the present, but the truth is, my characters (two teenage girls) never mention social media once. And that’s just not realistic. So, I guess you could say that it’s set in the before times—in the times before our lives played out so heavily on these tiny screens that live in the palm of our hands and the pocket of our pants.
Can you write contemporary fiction without including social media? Can you even be a writer without social media? (As writers, we’re so often told that we cannot succeed without a strong social media presence.) While including social media in stories certainly makes it accurate for the times we’re living in, does it make for good literature?
I’m trying to pay particular attention to this as I read Wildcat. The Instagram storyline feels very real and relevant, especially as it relates to mom culture today, but it also cheapens the story for me, in a way. While I have to endure social media’s hold on myself and society in my daily life, it’s not necessarily something that I want to experience as a reader. But this inclusion might not bother most readers. Social media interactions are rife with drama and people behaving badly, which is what keeps readers turning the page. As my writing teacher, Heather Sellers, used to say: We want things to go badly.
I know there are some books that rely even more heavily on social media than Wildcat does; for example, entire novels have been written as email exchanges. Perhaps this sort of thing will only become more and more common as our human experience and our relationships with social media continue to become even more (!) entwined. We see this happening across art in general: texting bubbles show up in movies, dramas play out around Instagram likes in television shows. It's unavoidable. And yet, is it palatable? For me, it’s on that edge between tolerable and intolerable. But for now, I’ll keep on reading.
Digital Life Hacks
Attach a trinket to your phone case (like a fidget toy) to give you something to play with when you feel the urge to turn towards your phone for distraction. Or buy a case like this one, which is made specifically for fidgeters.
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