Communication by Nancy L. Eady

I was born into a world where the most widespread method of long-distance communication was the rotary telephone, and the quickest communication came by telegraph. That didn’t count for overseas calls, though. We lived in Taiwan during the Watergate years, and we almost never telephoned people back in the United States. It was difficult to do so, and expensive. We would record cassette tapes with various things on them to send back to our grandparents. 

When I got married in 1987, communication had changed little beyond the invention of the push-button phone and the answering machine. If my husband went to the store, and I forgot to tell him something we needed, my only choice to get the missing item was to wait until the next time one of us returned to the store. The closest thing we had to a computer at home was a scientific calculator. My husband learned how to use a slide rule in high school, although I never had to. 

Things in the communication and computer realms heated up once we hit the late 1990s and early 2000s. I can still remember the first time I ever used a cell phone. My boss had asked me to take his car somewhere, and he had a car phone installed in it. While in the drive-through at McDonald’s, I called my husband just because I could. I was almost giddy and a little silly during this quick conversation, forgetting that the drive-through speaker was two-way. When I turned the corner to pick up my food at the window, the McDonald’s staff was in gales. 

We bought my first car phone in the mid-90s. I was going to school at night, driving about fifty miles each way through very rural areas, and Mark worried about what would happen to me if I broke down in the middle of nowhere. The early car phones came in a bag, and you had to charge them through the car charger for them to work. I was bad about not remembering to charge it. One night, my car broke down, and I had forgotten to charge my phone, so I had enough battery to dial our home number and have him answer with, “Hello.” Then the phone would die, and I couldn’t tell him what was going on. He figured out what was going on, and came and found me, but he was furious. 

It wasn’t until 2001 that I broke down and switched from my bag phone to a flip phone, but after that the updates continued roughly every two years until today, when I now have a phone that I suspect is smarter than me. 

Reflecting these changes in my writing can be challenging. I have to remember when plotting that it is very rare these days for someone to be both out of touch and unreachable. This means for a character to be in true peril, completely left to her own devices, she either must be without a cell phone, in a dead zone (they’ve gotten rare but they still exist) or be in close enough proximity to the bad guys that they remove her phone. There are other plausible possibilities, but it’s not as easy to be isolated these days as it was in the days of the rotary, plug in phone.

How have your plots had to adapt to changing technologies? What do you find most challenging to write about with modern communication and computer gadgets?