How the Internet Serves as a Plot Device in Modern Story Telling
In the tween movie Twilight, heroine Bella discovers that her boyfriend Edward is a vampire by consulting a website with a convenient link to supernatural occurrences in her very own tiny town. The Internet is here collectively written, but perfectly tailored to exactly her individual needs. It is not the wizened woman in the house down the road that holds the truth to Edward's identity, but an anonymous and multiply sourced repository of lore. A silent film would have cut to an intertitle to explain a secret; a Thirties noir would have spun newspaper headlines in circles to leap forward in time; a Seventies sci-fi flick would have introduced a wacky professor or scientist to deliver a piece of arcana. Today a quick cut to Google delivers the missing link. It advances the plot.
Christine Smallwood, What Does the Internet Look Like? (2010)
Notes
The evolution of storytelling to use the Internet as a device to move the plot forward, where, in the past, other sources of information would have served the characters.References
- What Does the Internet Look Like? Journal Article
Schemas
Not in any schema.
Triples
Not related to other memes yet.
Watson’s reading
Tags generated by IBM Watson from the text. Percentages are its confidence.
Categories
People, places and things
Concepts
Keywords
multiply sourced repository, Seventies sci-fi flick, heroine Bella, supernatural occurrences, em>Twilight</em>, heroine Bella discovers that her boyfriend Edward is a vampire by consulting a website with a convenient link to supernatural occurrences in her very own tiny town., boyfriend Edward, tiny town, convenient link, Thirties noir, individual needs, wacky professor, silent film