Your Phone is Murdering Your Soul.
So this is a “backlash” piece about how cellphones are making humans inhuman, including how cellphones make it impossible to WRITE about people anymore.
Which:
Granted, that is not the point of the article, which is itself a trolly clickhole, but the author claims that stories can no longer exist in a world where people spend two hours a day looking at their phones under a constant deluge of information and real time connection with other people. And that will not stand.
That infers that stories became impossible to write when air travel became available to everyone. When tuberculosis became treatable. When the telegraph was invented. How can we have stories now that we can communicate over vast distances almost instantaneously?!? I can’t recycle obstacles and plot conventions dependent on distance anymore? Then I shall declare people unworthy of further elucidation in story.
There will always be stories about the past, but there’s no point in writing about the past just because you can’t think of how to incorporate the huge changes to the human condition that have happened in the last twenty years.
As a screenwriter especially, freshness is critical to capturing the attention of a reader. Your scripts cannot be rehashes of ideas from 1994 with the addition of a solar flare knocking out cell towers. Not fresh.