Once again, Nicholas Carr:

Like the TV before it, the smartphone has remained largely invisible in the products of culture, even as its dominion over culture has grown. Watching a person look into a phone screen is even more boring than watching someone watch TV. And because people with smartphones know everything that’s going on the instant it happens, a society of phone-wielders is resistant to the development of dramatic tension. There’s a reason so much narrative art is now set in fantasy worlds or in the past: there are no phones there.

That’s beginning to change now, at least in literary story-telling. Because much of what flows through phones takes the form of words, writers who have grown up with texting and social media are incorporating the rhythms and quirks of online writing into their work, just as writers of epistolary novels did after letter-writing became commonplace in the eighteenth century. As the rise of autofiction shows, the claustrophobic solitude that characterizes social-media use is seeping into art.

I think I’ve noted this before, but nonetheless: I remember—with an increasing sense of not regret, exactly, but of an opportunity missed, or a warning unheeded—reviewing Carr’s break-out book, The Shallows, with the sort of assured dismissal that can only be conjured by someone still in the honeymoon phase of a habituation.

Well, selah. Some of us have to learn things the hard way.

Interesting, though, that the resistance to dramatic tension Carr describes here is accompanied by a generalised anxiety. And yes, sure, there’s a lot to be anxious about—but that was true in the 1970s and 80s, too. Television was the electronic soma of the Cold War.

But I wonder if it wasn’t also a contributing factor to the Cold War’s sustainment.