I then understood that my cousin had no notion of life outside the wireless telephony. At the same time, I noticed how awful would literature result to be if the mobile phone had always existed, as my cousin thinks. Imagine any fictitious classical story -Snow White, Red Ridding Hood, One Hundred Years of Solitude, etc.- and put a cellphone in the pocket of the main characters. Does the plot work? Does the plot work now that the characters can call each other from elsewhere? No matter what story we choose, the plot will not work at all. With a cell phone in her hands, for instance, Penelope is no longer uncertain of Ulysses’ return; with an I-phone in her basket, Red Ridding Hood warns her Grandma on time, and so the arrival of the lumberjack is not necessary. With a small mobile, someone would write to the Colonel, at least a short text message… it doesn’t matter if it’s a spam. And even the little pig of the wooden house would tell his brother that the wolf is going after him.
The main source of conflict on these types of stories is a misunderstanding, and the distance and lack of communication between characters. The absence of mobile phones allows these stories to exist.
No love story, for example, would have been tragic or complicated if the elusive lovers had had a phone in their breast pocket.
The romantic story of excellence (Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare) bases its entire dramatic tension in a fortuitous miscommunication: Juliet fakes a suicide, Romeo thinks she is dead and kills himself. Then, she awakes and commits suicide. (Sorry for the spoiler.)
If Juliet carried a cellphone, then she would have texted to Romeo in chapter 6:
Bae, Im fakin' my death. Don’t worry, and don’t do stupid things. Kisses :*
The entire dramatic knot of the following chapters would’ve faded.
All fiction stories fail if we add a cellphone to them. Every movie where the guy runs to the airport, thinking that he can convince her to get off the plane, are now solved by a single Whats app notification. And I wonder: is it happening the same thing with our lives? Aren’t we depriving ourselves from these fantastic adventures because we’re permanently “connected”? Will any of us, ever, run to the airport desperate to tell the woman we love: “Don’t get on that plane, life is here and now?”
No, I think that we, sitting comfortably on our couch, will just send a pitiful, brief text message of four capitalized lines. Maybe we would call once and pray that our beloved woman does not have her phone in vibrate mode. Why make the effort to live on the edge of adventure, if something will always interrupt the moment? A call, a binary message, an alarm.
Our sky is already infected with signs and secrets: Careful that the Duke is going there to kill you, beware, the apple is poisoned, if you give a kiss to the girl she’ll wake up and love you. Dad, come and get us that some birds have eaten the breadcrumbs.
Our plots (the written, the lived, and the imagined) in life are losing the spark of before. We have become some truly lazy heroes.