I recently read Elly Griffiths’ The Last Remains, written in 2023 but set in 2021. There was talk of masking, bubbling, bubbles, being pinged, the different lockdowns, Covid protocol. I wonder if people reading the book 15 years from now will be confused? A 15 year old recently asked on Reddit what living through Covid was like. He had been nine years old at the time and did not remember it. Sweden had no lockdowns, but we had congestion hosts at food courts, who asked you to sit at separate tables, even if you were married!
Michael Connelly received some criticism for including Covid in his crime novels set in those years. Some readers felt that books should be escapist, and reading about Covid during Covid was upsetting. Connelly replied that he wrote about current society and that Covid was part of Covid society. I wonder how tv series and books set during Covid times will ‘age’?
I am now reading Liza Marklund Red Wolf, and these pages really tickled me. I lived through it so I understood it perfectly, but for younger readers I wonder if it is confusing.
The above two pages reminded me of having to unplug to the phone to use the internet (and the noise the dial-up connection made), having internal telephones on your desk, not being able to search for anything like a phone number online, having a second phone line for your fax machine. The reference to handwritten letters to the editor made me smile. It’s much easier to send off an angry email these days than write something out, find a stamp and envelope, look up the address, and then go out and mail it.
Journalism is one field that has gone from journalists, photographers, sub-editors/fact checkers, researchers, layout artists, typesetters, printing to perhaps one or two people with a phone and a computer.
And the thing is the mainstream media no longer fact check anything. They print all the lies they want as long as they clear with the right wing first to ensure that this will be fed to the stupid as truth. People are beginning to wake up now though and the bigger the lie the bigger wake up call. Of course the “true believers” will always believe the lie because you can “fool some of the people all of the time”.