π 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.
Yeah, and he would have had a bit of trouble with the character limit. π 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. π
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... π
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. :(
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.β Turns out the wrong kind of aliens got hold of it.
George Saunders' 1st novel! Famed writer of short stories that often have atypical structures. It's 1/3 excerpts from old news reports (some fictionalized, some real), 1/3 stage play, 1/3 prose.
He wasn't part of the "twit-lit" scene, but I can definitely see how his experimental novel wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea.
I'd known nothing of Lincoln's long bereavement for his son, though, so the whole "returning to the tomb to hold his body" bit was an affecting bit of history.
It's a pretty moving tale, of ghosts trying to help Lincoln's dead son move through the bardo so that his father can turn his attention back to the war - and it was based on how absolutely devastated Lincoln was by the death of his son Willie in 1862 - but I am emphatically NOT the kind of person to tell someone else that they "must" give something a try if it's not to their taste.
TOO MANY GOOD BOOKS.
NOT ENOUGH TIME!
(You, too, lurking @CanisPundit . You can hurl digital objects at me any time. π)
π¬ 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!