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.

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.

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What Does the Internet Look Like?

Periodicals>Journal Article: Smallwood, Christine (2010), What Does the Internet Look Like?, The Baffler Literary Magazine, Vol 2, No. 01, Chicago, IL, Retrieved on -0001-11-30