SCALES #43: respective metal boxes
Hello!
I read Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi, a story about a relationship between two young people in Austin. The book happens to fall in a Certain Genre whose initialism rhymes with Ai Wei(wei), but I first got hip to the book’s existence from Robin Sloan’s newsletter, where he wrote, “It plays out largely through messaging, and Mary is one of the first writers, in any genre, to portray that kind of communication in a way that isn’t cringe-inducing but natural and graceful and real.” R.S. sees Emergency Contact as engaging with the profound intertwining of our on-phone and off-phone selves, in a way that narrative creative works—fiction in particular—have largely ignored, instead retreating to scenarios that play out fully in real space: “Drama that plays out through our little pocket-sized screens is just as rich—but how do we show it?”
Combine that ringing endorsement with positive memories of a Choi-authored (1) piece on teen social media habits and (2) charming snack video review, and I was sold.
And yes, the book succeeds in portraying a communication culture in a way that rings true to life! Choi is sensitive to the nuances that give the lived experience of texting its richness. She illuminates character development and plot through description of those nuances: the starts and stops of a “now typing” bubble, the difference in tone between using “2” or “to” (or, heaven forbid, “2” and “too”), the small tweaks in tone to match a converational partner’s texting style, the difference between emoji use and gesturing at the idea of emoji use, the point at which a conversation needs to be taken to phone or email. Understanding the conventions is taken for granted, rather than explained to death. Just a few small design cues transcribe the messages: two-column format with sent messages on the right, and a center timestamp marking the start of a new session. As a result, phone use isn’t some clunky contrivance in the book; it’s something that’s easily slipped into or out of, feeling true to 2018.
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I was reminded of how Ben Lerner incorporated a gchat conversation into Leaving the Atocha Station. Way back in 2011 or so, that similarly felt true to life in a way I wasn’t often seeing elsewhere.
One difference between Lerner and Choi is Lerner digs into the grit of overlapping conversation threads in a high-velocity gchat conversation. He retains the fuzz I also noticed in chat: responding to the other person after they’ve already moved on to a new point, never quite sure whether they’ve closed chat or just dropped their connection for a second.
Gchat in Leaving the Atocha Station.
Choi, on the other hand, incorporates text messages that are free of hiccups in the flow. Partly this reflects a difference in message culture, I think: the gchat text box lent itself to trying to spill out confessional blocks of text as quickly as possible, with more of an expectation of realtime communication (building on internet chat room culture). In contrast the tempo of text messages are just one metronome tick slower. Slightly more like deliberate asynchronous written correspondence than transcribed verbal conversation. A tendency not to talk over each other, respecting the throat-clearing “now typing” bubble.
Texting in Emergency Contact.
The smoothness and naturalness of the message conversations also aligns with a major interest of Choi’s book, expressed maybe most directly in the above excerpt, bathroom humor and all: navigating a relationship that feels purest and least awkward when conducted purely remotely.
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Also in communication culture:
(1) I liked Tim Carmody’s gloss (Snarkmarket lives on!) on Alexis Madrigal’s piece on the fading away of telephone culture:
“Avital Ronell, a wonky writer/philosopher I read a lot back in my grad school days, writes in The Telephone Book (1989) about the always-on nature of the telephone as a key element of its mode of being. ‘Respond as you would to the telephone, for the call of the telephone is incessant and unremitting. When you hang up, it does not disappear but goes into remission…. There is no off switch to the technological.’
This is now basically our state all the time! Not exclusively on the telephone, but on at least one of the electrical vibrations of telecommunications, everywhere we go, every minute of every day.
So it’s almost as if we’re now always on the telephone. A ring is like a call waiting notification that we can acknowledge or ignore. And most of the time, now, many of us ignore it. But only on the rarest occasions do we ignore the entire electronic hum. That’s where most of us live now.”
(2) Despite getting to it almost three years late, Rachel Syme’s monumental “SELFIE” still convinced me of the form’s revolutionary potential:
“The human longing to be seen and appraised has existed for centuries, but only a few had the technological power (and the distribution channels) to control it. Selfies are just one way of making up lost time, all of that yearning and desire that we never got to see because the powerless didn’t have their own cameras and printing presses.”
(3) D.T. Max describes a storytelling strategy in which close reading of characters’ social media activities is designed as a core part of the audience experience, not a tacked-on extra. (If only the vibe of this specific web series didn’t come across as a little too Facebook Empire infomercial-y.)
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Adeline Harris Sears, starting in 1856 at age seventeen, worked on an autographed quilt project for decades, structured around signatures she solicited from those she thought as the most important people of her time. Ultimately Sears pieced together a mind-boggling assortment of signatures, including Lincoln and seven other U.S. presidents; Sam Houston, Charles Sumner; William Cullen Bryant, Lydia Maria Child, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Julia Ward Howe, Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Greenleaf Whittier; Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, Jacob Grimm, William Thackeray; Agassiz, Bunsen, Humboldt, Samuel Morse. “Today, the autographs displayed in this beautiful and immaculately constructed quilt provide an intriguing glimpse into the way an educated young woman of the mid-nineteenth century viewed her world.” After belonging to Sears’ family for generations, the quilt was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1990s, and you can read an article and technical report in the Metropolitan Museum Journal. (h/t the Met’s still-going-strong “Artwork of the Day” feed)
Can’t help but think about the technology and social networks involved in Sears’ project, too!
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—Adam