#t9 texting supremacy

[frankenstein-was-a-grad-student]

The hardest era to write about from a technology standpoint must be 2008-2015. Shockingly small changes in narrative can have a dramatic impact on the accuracy of your setting and the tools your characters can deploy. I cannot figure out when Paul Murray thinks he’s set his book The Bee Sting. It’s described as “post 2008 financial crash Ireland” with a car dealership going under. Yet, everyone seems to have a smartphone (glass screen for typing so I’d assume iPhone which is insane from both a class perspective and a European perspective) with mostly reliable internet, Instagram is the app of choice for the teen protagonist (despite not even existing until October 2010), memories from years before including Minecraft (released 2011), characters text each other gifs, and the teen boy wants to buy the Nintendo switch. Leads us to believe we’re in minimally 2017 (by the switch), or at least late 2010 (by use of Instagram forgiving the switch). In the latter most generous scenario we need to believe that this teenager in Ireland downloaded Instagram almost immediately after it came out as well as all her friends AND her 12-13 year old little brother already has a burner account. Moreover, we need to believe her phone internet was good enough to constantly have access to it. It all seems rather unlikely.

I was very excited to read this book because it existed in such a fun era for children and young adults: the tackiest phones (give me a Razr or a T Mobile sidekick), the joy of logging onto the internet to check 9gag or Imgur, T9 texting, the displays of class and wealth evident from the type of phone you had or whether or not your parents had fast enough internet to watch YouTube in anything other than 360p.

Being a kid in this era was strange—technology grew with you in a 0-60 kind of way. Sad to see Murray hasn’t quite captured that in this otherwise lovely work.