😂 I've said this before, because the trial scene in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV is excellent for describing the whims of the crowd, but hot dog: Dostoevsky had social media *down pat* long before our current tech.
I first read NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND as a teen, when the self-loathing protag best sings out to self-loathing youth, but I've always loved this chapter, and its description of how even educated humans will sometimes make a public spectacle of pain just to regain some agency over suffering.
😬 Alternately, though, I'm pretty sure that Dostoevsky would have been even more of a nightmare than the rest of us if he were online today, so I'm glad he had his era, and we have ours!
Yeah, and he would have had a bit of trouble with the character limit. 😂 It would have been an endless thread...
I'm also dead certain that many of the great novels would never have been written if those writers had had access to social media instead. 🙃
Or perhaps social media would have evolved differently and been more like digital serialized fiction in the beginning. I'm figuring it would take them a good while to lose their attention span if the internet simply appeared out of nowhere and dropped into their laps... 😂
Oooo, if we'd frozen internet time on LJ and Blogspot days, we'd definitely have a rich and integrated culture of serialized fiction models today!
Alas, LJ got overrun by Russians, Blogspot stalled in its growth model, and we all fled into the arms of Zuck instead. :(
@MLClark
It could have gone so many ways....I'm just thinking about that 1999 interview with Bowie where he describes the internet as "an alien life form.” Turns out the wrong kind of aliens got hold of it.