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Brief look at how texting has been used in film and TV in the last decade-- it's an interesting little essay but he loses me when he holds up Sherlock as having "solved" the problem of depicting texting with its unimaginative and obnoxious onscreen texts because they're "timeless." I think every other example he used was better (and there's nothing wrong with a style of messaging "dating" the film or TV show, which is a silly argument for someone who wants to talk about film to make), though I thought his comments on how showing a screen of a phone resulted in an overlong shot-reverse shot were worth thinking about

Once you establish that there's texting/messaging happening, cutting back to a screen is usually a bad choice for the reasons Tony Zhou cites. I don't know, Sherlock's texting style isn't bad, but maybe a bit too unadorned to work for everything. I don't mind Fincher's approach in House of Cards either. For me, the earliest example that had a balance of visual/stylistic integrity and legibility was All About Lily Chou-Chou, which he also references briefly. The worst offender I've yet seen by far was this year's excessive and overly baroque texting in Non-Stop. Bad visual design compounded by bad writing, wherein the storytelling committed to an almost absurd overreliance on texting, the opposite of the cliche Zhou mentions where characters pretend there's no phone service or that, for whatever other reason, nobody can text or chooses to do so.

One of the earliest and most creative representations of on-screen texting I can recall is Jae-eun Jeong's terrific Take Care of My Cat, where the texting scenes were quiet pauses (because the characters were texting) and the text was 'projected' onto the scene (e.g. they're lying on their bed and the text is projected onto the end of the bed in the foreground) - digitally, as I recall. Unless I've misremembered this or transposed this detail from another film! It gave that part of the narrative more the quality of a voiceover or soliloquy rather than additional dialogue or naked plot development.

As a side note, I was dismayed to see on IMDB that she's only completed one further feature in the last 13 years.

I like All About Lily Chou-Chou as well, where the chatroom interaction, with cuts to black over which individual characters are being typed and formed into coherent sentences helps to emphasise that effort being expended to chat with others, and the sense that the online forum chatter is taking place in a different kind of mental space to the real world action. The disconnect of the electronic device there seems to be the entire point, where people can form quite intense communal connections behind silly fake usernames rhapsodising over the music of their favourite singer whilst in real life they may be doing horrible, bullying damage to each other. Or where someone can contribute to discussions intellectually and emotionally whilst being powerless to have any effect on events in the real world. Is that retreating from the 'real world' or someone finding the only way they feel able to express themselves?

(EDIT: By far my favourite depiction of cyberspace and forums turns up in an episode of Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex series called Chat! Chat! Chat!. It goes a bit off the rails at the end as the plot has to be shoehorned in but I loved that what could be a dry recap episode for events up to that point gets turned into an exploration of lots of different theories put forward in a roundtable discussion, and the idea of group dynamics in a cyberspace world is a fascinating one, such as the way people enter and leave a discussion for unknown reasons, or can pretend to be a different person, or have an online persona that they are trying to live up to. I liked that you also have the discussion taking place in a kind of public arena, strengthening the links between classical and modern definitions of 'forum'. And I love that you see the text messages building up as the conversation goes on, with the advert break being used by the moderator to 'dump' all of the messages out of the system to start with a blank slate!)

There does seem to be a push and pull between showing technology as an integral part of the world around us and linked in with all of our real world action (which at its worst results in Sandra Bullock living her life entirely through the internet and then being almost wiped out from it in The Net; or those terrible cyberspace movies like Hackers or Johnny Mnemonic which try much too hard to literalise online concepts as physical spaces), and portraying the online world as something separate and unique with its own rules and structures that do not quite perfectly correlate with, or neatly link up to, real world concepts. Sure the Wild West of the online world is getting more tamed over time as commercial companies become more savvy and ever larger numbers of individuals move online and start to conduct their business there (which is presumably why films cannot get away any more with slightly strange approaches to how websites, search engines or YouTube style video sharing sites work, as we have probably gotten to the point where almost everyone has had an experience with these kinds of sites and won't accept anything less than a convincing online interaction from the characters they see in films and television programmes who also get involved in those kinds of interactions) but there are still issues around which hegemony is going to win out in best portraying the online world to the widest possible audience.

There also seems to be an issue that I don't think has been properly understood yet (not even by myself, I think!) that is threatening to split the onscreen portrayal of gadgets into two extreme trends. This might just be because film or television dramatisations themseves naturally gravitate towards extremes in how anything is portrayed but I think there is the danger that technology use is polarising into either groups of 'important and/or devious people' solving/causing crimes whilst linked into giant government computer surveillance networks (the Jack Bauer use of technology to solve crimes, or force through interactions with every person, building security system or computer network he meets) that give them every possible access to every possible kind of computer system and gadget in the world; or the Hollyoaks kind of use of technology to show a couple of people bickering with each other over their love lives or sending LOLcats to each other. There has to be a better portrayal of the online world waiting to be shown that more positively portrays a balanced middle ground in which people are working together constructively (not for urgent national security, or flippantly contrived romantic comedy reasons, but just for the purposes of existing and interacting with one another) in an online space.

Text messaging just seems to be another front in that 'battle', and like any concept it can either be portrayed in a manner that is sensitive to how technology can change the nature, or structure, or dynamics of a scene (such as allowing action in multiple locations to take place simultaneously, or for someone to become aware of a piece of information that others in the room are not aware of; or to suddenly find out about an event almost as it is happening rather than having to wait for news to reach them in a more leisurely fashion, and so on) or add extra nuances to one (and more accurately reflect the way that people interact now). Or it can just be used to add a bit of flashy CGI pizzazz for no other reason than to spice up an otherwise boringly rote scene with a bit of 'modernisation'.

I do agree with domino's point on not worrying about the use of technology dating a film to a particular era of time. Some of the best films ever made (and even some of the worst: The Net now provides a unintended insight into a Windows 95-era of online computing for example!), not just those directly involving technology, are situated within the era in which they were made and provide their own interest as time capsules capturing a period even beyond a particular fictional story that they might be telling. I think a good example of this would be a film like Brian De Palma's Redacted, which for me was a great snapshot of a particular moment of a late 2000s era of online interaction, one just pre-the current online era of retreat into social media solipsistic introspection and/or need for everyone to have an individual media presence and awareness of 'brand management' (through sites such as Twitter, etc, well placed to allow users of both mobile and desktop technologies to interact through a single site. Although a couple of sequences are just anticipating the upcoming trend of online Skype conversations), instead showing an online world of overwhelming masses of information cascading at the audience from multiple sources and multiple viewpoints, mostly involving videos showing a battle of hegemonies between embedded journalism videos (with particular historical contexts and neutral tone), to emotive personal journalistic expose pieces, to the use of the online space by insurgent groups to disseminate videos of terrorist acts (including execution videos, which are back in the media spotlight at this moment in time). Where the flippant is jostling with the profound, which is jostling with the severely disturbing, all material thrown at the viewer without a wider guiding context to judge any of it by, just for the audience's own individual conscience to deal with.

Interesting that this comes up because the new Jason Reitman film seems to lean on this a lot, and is seemingly about the disconnect that's happened because of instant communication technology. One of the shots in the trailer for Men, Women & Children is a high school hallway full of teens walking and staring at their phones, almost like something out of a socially conscious zombie movie. How it will make for an effective drama kind of remains to be seen for me (between serious Adam Sandler and the fact that Reitman's last movie wasn't up to par for many isn't helping much either).

I like All About Lily Chou-Chou as well, where the chatroom interaction, with cuts to black over which individual characters are being typed and formed into coherent sentences helps to emphasise that effort being expended to chat with others, and the sense that the online forum chatter is taking place in a different kind of mental space to the real world action.

Similarly, back in 1996 [!] fully one-third of Morita Yoshimitsu's incredible <haru> was comprised of chatroom and email text, most simple white-on-black-screen … and most completely silent (not even keyboard sounds). As in AALCC, it is sometimes very difficult to determine which character in <haru> is hiding behind which screen name. And Morita’s oblique editing, even more than Iwai's, initially frustrates viewers’ attempts to link screen names and faces. More interestingly, perhaps, even Morita's characters themselves seem unable to disentangle their ‘real’ lives from their online personae from the ideal lives they often associate with movies. Hoshi, the female protagonist, for example, pretending to be one of the guys online, writes that everything she’s learned about romance she’s learned from [conventional, tightly plotted, distinctly un-<haru>-like] movies, and she’s sure that, if she can just ‘act’ her life as if it were a movie, everything would be OK.

<haru> sounds great!

On the issue of films presenting information, I wonder if there could be any relation to the early 20th century films based on literary adaptations which would often start with a shot of the actual novel being adapted over which the opening credits would play. Or the credits would be inside the book, being revealed as pages were turned. Or we see the first page of the classic novel, maybe with the text repeated in voice over before we fade out from the book into the first scene of the film adaptation of it. It seems that we are in that same period with regard to representing electronic information now, in the sense of working out how to convey the idea of translation from one medium to the other and films trying to legitimately represent what they are doing to an audience as a new cinematic concept through entirely new signifiers.

Maybe it suggests an insecurity on the part of filmmakers towards needing to prove the legitimacy of how they are presenting information to their audience (the need to show the book that is being adapted becoming the need to show the screen of the mobile phone in a reverse shot, then the actor reacting to what they are reading). Eventually a kind of fluency or familiarity of the audience with that concept of an online world, as with the concept of literary adaptation, can begin to be taken for granted (and really should, as the anime films in the video show the boundless possibilities that the online world offers for displaying information) so that shot-reverse shot framework may not be necessary at all and so just slips away as a previous norm, except for very occasional specific uses in order to emphasise a moment through its use.

Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t think that just showing the screen is a problem. The shot/reverse shot can be handled artlessly, of course, but so can overlaying the messages (e.g. the ‘device moves so texts move, too’ example.) One deft usage is (maybe not specifically a text message) in the Royal Tenenbaums, when

Spoiler

the elevator attendant is posing as Royal’s doctor, and he gets a message on his beeper to see if he can cover for someone who had worked a double the day before. So the family assumes that he’s getting called to another patient and we get an ironic chuckle.

I also don’t think it’s comparable to showing the physical copy of a novel in the title sequence of its adaptation. The direct link to 20th (and other 21st) century movies would be to letters, newspaper headlines and articles, signs, etc.: information in text that had to be conveyed to an audience. Isn’t that usually best handled by just showing the text itself?

So cutting to a shot of the screen would ultimately be my personal preference, but even then I wouldn’t be prescriptive about it because there isn’t going to be only one way to show texts well. That’s something that struck me in the essay, that he was talking about solving the problem as though everyone would collectively whittle text messaging down to the one thing that works. There are going to be as many solutions as there are movies and shows that feature texting prominently.

I'll go back to letters for a moment, though, and say that voiceover shouldn’t be left out as an option, particularly for long conversations. The only example in the essay of text messages being vocalized was when someone dictated one to the camera "like an idiot," but I imagine that, just throwing shit out there, having audio of a back and forth between two characters laid over footage of one of them going about her life while occasionally tacking away at her phone could work better than either cutting back and forth from the screen or having the messages float around next to her.

There’s also another direction that the essay starts to approach when it notes that Sherlock demands some cognitive labor because it doesn’t tell the viewer who is sending or receiving messages, which is to show characters texting but not show the texts. Part of the overall problem is that a lot of these movies/shows want to take an omniscient view of the messages that people are reading and writing. A minimal approach to disclosure might be beneficial.

As far as the dating goes, it seems odd to take up against cell phone interfaces as your first target in that mire. Why not clothing, cars, home decor, hairstyles, and on and on and on? In any case, I’d much prefer a goofy floating early 2000s mobile GUI to the bland middlebrow tastefulness that Sherlock settled on.

Only sort of related. Article from the New York times:

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/201 ... blogs&_r=0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Basically; some theaters in China have installed technology that allows viewers to text comments about the movie while they're watching it in the theater and the text messages will display on screen for the audience to read. Barf.

Context and intended effect is key to whether you show something or not show something ... text messaging included.

For instance, take Up in the Air. There's a minor scene where Ryan and Alex are on a Blackberry messaging chat in two different hotel rooms. The way the conversation goes is that it is supposed to lead to a full-on sex chat but it is averted in the end, both in action and in words. The audience sees the chat as it unfolds. Seeing it works for that particular scene as it is a demonstration of both parties' wit and their relationship (sexual/flirtatious and dependent on technology). It would have been a detriment if the audience did not see what was going on.

But again, it all depends on what you are going for in the storytelling. There are times when not seeing a message works better for the story. It is either because it is not necessary - an action can infer what the content is (someone leaving the room in a rush implies an some kind of emergency) - or it can create suspense by withholding information to be revealed later. But if you have something like the aforementioned scene, it's helpful to know what people are actually typing since it serves both the comedy and character reveal.

This is all making me wish that Sandra Bullock had a mobile with her in Gravity!

NASA:
"OMG! I'm floating into space!!!! snd hlp ASAP"
2 attachments: one wide-eyed selfie against starry backdrop and one map of starfield with arrow pointing to current location.

Bullock's kid was symbolic of her missing cellphone duh