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@EdenicFaithful I just finished up Donna Tartt's The Secret History, which my wife bought for me after seeing it recommended by fashion girlies on social media. It is, at the end of the day, a high class thriller, John Grisham with literary pretensions. I enjoyed the book immensely, I wanted something relatively light after reading a lot of heavy non-fiction lately. And it felt made for me, it is a thriller following a bunch of weirdo pseudo-aristocratic classics students, and I'm the kind of guy who went to a northeastern undergrad school and wore a vintage camel hair sportcoat to a class studying Procopius' The Secret History. There's an effortpost brewing in my notes about the book's status as the progenitor of the "Dark Academia" aesthetic meme, and the memetics of online aesthetics more generally.
With the exception of classics (The Bible, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, etc.) which I can't avoid having an opinion on going in, I try to avoid reading about something while I am still in the process of reading the work itself. And because my wife bought it for me as a gift, and specifically referenced seeing it on social media, I kind of assumed that it was new fiction, from the past five years or so. Having finished it, I looked at a few reviews, trying to find things I hadn't caught on my read through. The setting felt vaguely 80s, but there weren't enough clear references to really pin it down, and it felt like an odd time period to pick if you weren't going to use it much and like reference Reagan or era-appropriate music...imagine my surprise when I found out the novel was written in 1992 and the reason it lacked a lot of period-references was because at the time it was written the novel was simply set in the present, with no need to let people know when it was because the underlying assumption was that elite liberal arts students would more or less always be like that, Tartt wouldn't have been able to imagine that two and a half decades later college would be so completely eaten by computerization that her novel would be rendered completely historical.
I had, of course, assumed that the novel was written today, and set in a vague past to avoid smartphones. It is tough to imagine much of novel's moody pacing working in the social media age, with characters texting or engaging in posting every event on social media. Indeed, I have trouble thinking of murder mysteries or thrillers that successfully integrate the smartphone into their plotting. Every modern novel in the genre seems to avoid them by various obvious crutches, such as lampshading that a character refuses to use cellphones, having the phone lose reception run out of batteries or be broken at every critical moment, or by the simple expedient of forgetting about it. I don't read a ton of new fiction, but I can't think of a thriller that handles cellphone usage well. Even the sci-fi novels I recall reading which featured greater communications advances failed to reflect how I actually use cell phones in reality.
So now to get to my Small Scale Questions: how does one successfully integrate the digital world into the classic murder mystery or thriller structure? What authors or works have done so? Is it even possible to do so, or does the digital age simply require that we maintain a higher willing suspension of disbelief? Does communications tech usage date any work to a particular five-year period, because communications tech is moving so fast (ie, in 2003 the gang of high school friends would have definitely used AIM, by 2008 AIM was lame and facebook messenger was everything, by 2013 nobody I knew in college used messenger for much of anything preferring snapchat, in the decade since we've seen the rise and fall of a half dozen social media services, data plans and wifi access have gone from very limited to universal, etc.)? Is there a similar literary discourse about prior technological transitions? Did the telegraph and telephone cause authors to go "oh, shit, so many plots out the window, better set this story in the past or in the wild west or something?" Did literary critics talk about how old plots were obviated by car travel?
The answer is that for whatever reason, the digital world is a mountain of red herrings distorting and disrupting informed observation. The laziest way to do it would be that an influencer who has faked their death multiple times for clicks is murdered for real, and their dipshit following is muddying all possible genuine search ability with "We did it Reddit!" mass broadcasted armchair investigation. Even better if there is an "influencer detective" condensing the phenomenon.
For very tangential reasons, this question reminds me of the how to show texting/internet in film addressed by Every Frame a Painting https://youtube.com/watch?v=uFfq2zblGXw
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