Social media is often portrayed as the enemy of the writer—but like any good enemy, perhaps it’s best to keep it close. Don’t miss this craft essay by Isle McElroy for our Social Media Week series.
Social Media in (Predominantly) Realist Fiction
Fake Accounts
Social Media as the Gateway to Genre
While both South and Oyler make use of social media in recognizable worlds, Joss Lake’s Future Feeling and Beth Morgan’s A Touch of Jen use social media as an access point to uncanny, fantastical realms.
In Future Feeling, a trans man named Pen tries to hex a trans influencer named Aiden because the latter seems to have bypassed all the emotional turmoil that normally comes with transition. The hex, as one might expect, goes terribly wrong. Instead of hexing Aiden, an innocent trans man gets caught in the crosshairs, and Pen and the influencer are forced to enter the shadowlands—a fantastical realm that literalizes transition—to save the man Pen has hexed. Morgan’s novel follows a similar path, albeit with shades of “me and my partner saw you from across the bar and liked your vibe.” Remy and Alicia, a couple on the rocks, rebuild their relationship through a shared obsession with their former coworker, Jen. They ingratiate themselves into her life, and their desire, practiced at a distance, turns into a threat once they all come into close proximity.
In these two texts, social media is a tunnel into much-more-troubling settings. The initial connection between the characters in these novels is superficial and safe—but once they venture beyond social media, the worlds around them shift away from realism toward something magical or horrific.
Rather than avoiding social media in their work, writers can use it to mark transitions between worlds and reveal character. Social media is uncanny—we spend time in a place that does not exist pretending to be our best selves. That uncanniness can help shape a world, however, when characters—as in Lake’s and Morgan’s books—must confront each other offline. How can the weirdness of seeing someone anew, offline, create tension between who characters truly are and how they present? How might the clash of worlds—online with off—give rise to a surreal, unpredictable world from which the characters cannot escape?
Social Media as Narrator
In A. E. Osworth’s We Are Watching Eliza Bright, social media is both absent and omnipresent. The novel tells the story of Eliza, a female video game programmer who loses her job after filing a sexual harassment complaint against two male colleagues. Though, on its surface, the book appears to be told through a third-person omniscience, Osworth’s narrator is actually a collection of internet trolls brought together through a message board.
Early in the novel, the narrators announce themselves: “Even the most villainous among us would, in the end, choose to protect the city. If you see something, say something, and all that bullshit. Well. We would say something. Because we love it here. It is a novel place. Endless space.” Osworth creates a collection of speakers that believes in its own purpose and righteousness. This narrator—or narrators—captures the extensive scope and the limits of assumed omniscience. The narrators are limited, but they do not consider themselves so. They believe in their power to perceive and to understand; their confidence makes them dangerous.
In We Are Watching Eliza Bright, the narration has both a functional and philosophical purpose. Functionally, the speakers see into Eliza’s life—the speakers are a group of men who pass her on the street and at work or stalk her online—and provide commentary, like the narrator of a nineteenth-century novel casting judgment on the other characters. But Osworth’s narrator, flawed and unwilling to recognize its flaws, is also a critique of social media and the toxic communities that come together online. The narrators are hyper vigilant and limited in their perspective. The reader is not supposed to take everything they say as authentic truth but must also accept that this is the only truth that they are receiving.
The book is not an escape from social media—as we all foolishly tell ourselves books will be—but a reinscribing of the very things that make truth so difficult to establish online. In this instance, social media as narrator offers a variation on the classic trope of the unreliable narrator. This narrator is not unreliable; narration itself is unreliable, and what emerges is false omniscience. In reading Osworth’s book, we are shown how social media can create an opportunity to reimagine narration, even as it recreates what can feel most maddening about being online. Being on Twitter, for instance, can often feel like watching a parade of half-truths and misinformation, but for a writer looking to challenge the notion of truth, these kinds of conflicting narratives offer an exciting way to tell stories. How might a story narrated only through Instagram comments be told? What about a story told only through subtweets? Social media offers countless ways to expand our understanding of narration.
Social Media as Literary Form
As deeply as We Are Watching Eliza Bright models itself after online discourse, it still maintains a fairly traditional form—albeit with a few brief chapters comprised only of direct messages. In Calvin Kasulke’s Several People Are Typing, however, social media commandeers the form of the novel, as the reader is immersed in a book-length Slack conversation between employees at a public relations firm in New York.
The novel opens after Gerald, a middling employee at the firm, becomes trapped in Slack. While Gerald’s body remains upright at his home computer, in something like a coma, his consciousness cannot escape from the app. Even after he tells his coworkers—and Slackbot—about his dilemma, they are quick to dismiss his story. Kasulke uses the situation and the form to enhance character and stakes. Talking to his colleagues, Gerald understands how absurd this all sounds, and his colleagues are quick to assume his story is merely an attempt to work from home without suffering professional consequences.
Social media is uncanny—we spend time in a place that does not exist pretending to be our best selves.
What makes this form work is that Kasulke is careful to distinguish between the voices of the characters. Traditionally, dialogue is one of the most effective ways to reveal character in fiction: Learning how a character talks tells us so much about who they are. But talking is not limited to annunciation, and in Several People Are Typing, typed dialogue stands in for the dialogue a reader might normally find in a novel. The characters come to life not only through their voices, but how they uniquely respond to the same situation.
Kasulke’s decision to tell the entire novel through Slack is risky, but the form works because it relies on a fixed constraint. There are limits to what Kasulke can include. There are no extended physical descriptions of characters—except for when one man discovers Gerald’s body and describes the physical changes—and even though some of them hook up, the scenes are delivered after the fact, through retellings and requests to keep what happened a secret. Countless novels have reckoned with the soul-crushing impact of spending your life returning to the same office five days a week, but Several People Are Typing literalizes the fear that many of those novels can only imply: What if the job actually sucks your soul into itself? Social media, then, is not a limiting factor, but a way to reinvent a story that has begun to grow stale after many retellings. What other tropes—the stranger coming to town, the cheating husband, the road trip novel—might be reimagined through the constraints of social media?
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Over the years, I’ve been in a few workshops where the consensus was that writers shouldn’t include social media and modern technology for fear of dating their work. The conventional wisdom was that technology changes too rapidly, and that future readers might find the work stale or, worse, indecipherable. Though I may very well be proven wrong should the books above become “unreadable” over the next decade, writers like South, Oyler, Lake, Morgan, Osworth, Kasulke, and so many others are showing us that social media is an effective tool for enhancing traditional literary elements like character, theme, plot, form, and setting. Sure, social media might steal away hours of great writing time—but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth writing about. There are ways we can expand our creativity by writing about online experiences, rather than feeling drained or resentful toward the hours we spend scrolling. Social media companies exploit our attention for profit, so it’s only fair that writers exploit their products to create unpredictable, surreal, and exciting new worlds in fiction.
Isle McElroy is the author of The Atmospherians, a NY Times Editors' Choice. Other writing appears in The Guardian, the NY Times, NYT Mag, Vogue, The Atlantic, Tin House, and elsewhere. Their chapbook, Daddy Issues, was published in 2017.
Isle has received fellowships from The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The Tin House Summer Workshop, The Sewanee Writers Conference, The Inprint Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, and The National Parks Service.
Social media is often portrayed as the enemy of the writer—but like any good enemy, perhaps it’s best to keep it close. Don’t miss this craft essay by Isle McElroy for our Social Media Week series.
Social media is often portrayed as the enemy of the writer—but like any good enemy, perhaps it’s best to keep it close. Don’t miss this craft essay by Isle McElroy for our Social Media Week series.
Social media is often portrayed as the enemy of the writer—but like any good enemy, perhaps it’s best to keep it close. Don’t miss this craft essay by Isle McElroy for our Social Media Week series.