you could potentially write an entire contemporary novel and not mention the word “car” and the reader might not even notice something was out of place.

imagine, someone reading a book set in our world when they know nothing about our technology. imagine a character saying something like “yeah, when I went down to Florida last week…” and the reader just being boggled because isn’t Florida like…300 miles from where the story is set

“I’ll go by the store on the way home” “oh I need to pick up my brother while I’m out” “I’m going to travel up to my aunt’s house for the weekend” it’s breaking my brain.

to people in a world where magic is commonplace, it would be like this. they wouldn’t think to say that the lights in the house or the locks on doors or the carriage on the street work by magic.

of course, in a story we take liberties because the reader needs things pointed out. But think of the kinds of wild things you could do with worldbuilding if you just didn’t go out of your way to explain. Idk.

Whoa

I never thought about it this way but yeah it makes total sense

And like, the followup to “Yeah, when I went down to Florida last week” could be “Did you drive or fly?”

“Huh? Drove, it was only like six hours each way.”

“Holy crap. How many speeding tickets did you get?”

And the reader’s head explodes because in just a couple lines of dialogue:

* It’s possibly to go from [location] to Florida pretty casually in this setting.

* Flight exists as a mode of transport in this setting.

* Flight exists as a mode of transport in this setting but someone would choose not to use it, and yet still not only go to Florida and back in a week, but make the journey one way in under a day.

* What the hell is a “speeding ticket?”

This is really cool, can we have a name for it like “negative space worldbuilding” or something where stuff about the setting is implied by the stuff happening around it?

"Negative space worldbuilding" is a great term for it. For instance:

"Did you drive or fly?"

"Gated. It was an emergency."

"Yow, you can afford that?"

"It's not TOO bad, if you agree to go during off-peak hours. I had to be up at midnight to make the gate hub by 3 AM. Went through perched on a shipping crate full of stuffed animals. At least it's fast."

Yes yes exactly, but think of just HOW ambiguous you can be like this.

Imagine two characters having this exchange:

“Why didn’t you call?”

“I was on the road!”

“I was just worried, no need to get grumpy. Are you headed out tomorrow?”

“Yeah. This is my first time flying.”

“Oh. Are you nervous?”

This scene could continue for a long time without revealing to the reader that we are in a fantasy world that runs on magic and uses scrying stones, carriages and dragons.

In a fantasy novel, we’d write something like this: “She took out her scrying stone. It was a round, polished piece of clear quartz the size of her palm, carved with a specific set of glyphs imbued with magic that allowed her to communicate with other people who possessed similar stones within range.”

But like, imagine it’s not a scrying stone, it’s a smartphone.

A few things:

1. I don’t know off the top of my head exactly what a smartphone is primarily made of, and I’m from this world.
2. What is its primary function that I have to let the reader know about? The ability to make phone calls? Access to the internet? I’m probably going to go with “remote communication.”
3. What does it mean to “get someone’s number?” Are the devices numbered? Who is numbering them? Are people assigned numbers? The reader wonders. But I, as a person living in this world, don’t really know how phone numbers work either.
4. These phones are a very new technology that’s changed the world. But what happened to make them possible all of a sudden, after 3,000 years of written history in this world has passed? I’m not sure I can give a complete answer to that.
5. Why are they always needing to be charged, the reader wants to know. What charges them? What is a “charger?”
6. “Mine’s an Apple charger, it won’t work with yours.” Are your characters charging APPLES????
7. It says that the protagonist “hung up.” What does that mean?
8. I need to introduce all the abilities of the smartphone early on in the story. It’s going to seem like a lazy cop-out if, in chapter 26, the protagonist is suddenly able to use her phone’s flashlight to navigate a dark area and this hasn’t been mentioned before.
9. “She picked her phone up off the coffee table. It was a hand-sized, rectangular device, similar in appearance to a mirror, but when imbued with electrical energy, its surface would display images and glyphs that responded to her touch. The smartphone was one of the most revolutionary technological advances of the twenty-first century. Its primary function was as a communication device, allowing her to send her voice, her image, or messages she typed onto the screen to others who possessed similar devices, but it also allowed her to search compiled records of human knowledge for any information she desired, listen to music, and watch pre-recorded theatrical performances, known as “movies—”

i can barely fucking handle twitter now. mfs should be watching pepper the pig

Not to sound like a boomer but I’m so, so, so, so, SO glad I grew up making mud potions, pretending sticks were swords, drawing with crayons and playing with toy dinosaurs rather than spending my most crucial developmental years swiping at a screen for hours on end.

I can’t imagine that shit is good for motor skills. Like…a kid that spends their free time running, climbing, writing, and drawing vs. a kid that is just tapping and swiping at a smartphone? Play is necessary for development??? And for happiness? (Adults should be playing too. Go squish some mud and you’ll feel better.)

But also?? If you aren’t very purposeful and conscientious about self-curating your internet experience, it is just horrendous for mental health for ANYONE, I can’t imagine what it might do to a child

i work in customer service and please know that i am not baby-boomer aggrandizing when i say i have seen so many children, literally toddlers, dead-silent and completely, utterly absorbed in tablets bigger than their heads. i’ve seen a shitton of pre-pubescent girls posing for pictures together, planning their angles and backgrounds, and checking what shots their mom took bc they’re worried “they might look fat.” like. i’m talking 7 year olds. this isn’t meant to be some holier than thou bullshit, this is me being legitimately terrified about a problem i really haven’t seen any of us discuss or even acknowledge

In one of my psychology classes the teacher told us about a study that showed that toddlers nowadays have a hard time learning how to write and do fine motor things because of the skip the stage of learning with their hands and all they do is swipe and click.

oh!! my god!!! that is an incredibly literal/physical symptom of these newfound techno-reliances we’ve formed. a professor of mine referred to it as our “tech fetishization,” this expectation that all updated forms of tech are innately and unquestionably good things. we see technology as an amorphous, abstract concept vs. a substantive influence in our mental, emotional, and physical states but holy shit it really, really is

Technology is shaped for profit, not for what benefits us. 

For example, privacy: It benefits us to be able to decide who sees our personal pictures and information, when, where, and how. But that doesn’t benefit companies like Facebook and Instagram–they would rather broadcast it as widely as possible to maximize ad revenue. 

Facebook’s algorithms have learned to show us content that’s upsetting or enraging more often, to keep us absorbed in their site longer having soul-crushing political discussions close enough that we want them to agree with us, but far enough away for maximum outrage and engagement.

Apple’s iPhone and iPad games are often set up to make it hazardously easy for children to get addicted and spend real money on them, and it’s actually quite difficult and time-consuming to render a device truly child-friendly and keep kids from being exposed to inappropriate ads and content.

The tech industry is hugely under-regulated, partly because right now politicians mostly don’t understand it in the way it would need to. But that could change, if we collectively started demanding changes to the law, to make sure technology is built in a way that prioritizes users instead of corporate profit.

i mean yes, the corporations and industry and stuff are evil, but the parents also chose to buy tablets and phones and give them to their very young children. We can’t totally derail this conversation into talking about the tech industry and how poorly regulated it is when the kids themselves are four year olds whose access to technology is totally dependent on their parents, who are actively giving them access to said technology.

(It deserves mentioning that the people having toddlers right now are almost certainly Millennials. Let’s not excuse shitty parenting on their part any more than we would previous generations.)

This isn’t new either. Gen Xers with shitty parents will tell you about how they were basically brought up by the tv. iPads and iPhones are obviously different (more portable and pervasive), but this isn’t the first generation in which parents have used tech to shut their kids up and keep them out of the way.