Often I will get these emails in my litter box consisting of a list of items that people born in 2000 (or 1990, whatever) will not be familiar with. These lists are designed by some anonymous sadist to remind the rest of humans how OLD they are getting. However, they do send one's thoughts off on tangents. Such as: With the advent of cell phones, a lot of suspense/horror movie cliches have bit the dust, or been replaced by new ones.
Consider: no longer can the phone wires be cut, leaving the hero in peril without a means to communicate with the outside world. Now all he has to do is whip out his cell, I-phone, or blackberry, and he can communicate with the cavalry. Also, scenes where crazy criminals make the hero run all over town to phone booths a la
Dirty Harry will be pointless, since when was the last time you saw a phone booth?
Ditto for telephone lines being down due to Mother Nature, as in
Key Largo. Cell phones work in most natural disasters, with the exception of possibly earthquakes and nuclear bombs. So, no more dramatic tension with trees, gaping rifts in the earth or giant marauding rabbits having knocked out the phone lines.
New cliches have been made to take up the slack. Witness "The X Files": Mulder and Scully communicated endlessly by cell, but they could still be stymied by service dead zones, or dropping the dang things, or even by talking to the wrong person ("Hollywood A.D."). Another new threat is the Big Brother angle -- don't forget the sinister specter of being tracked by the government/Consortium by your cell signal!
The truly creative character will always be faced with new or improving technologies challenging their
modus operandus. The next thing on the horizon I predict will be a thorn for medical drama writers - medical record chips. What will House do when there is no mystery about a patient's medical past? I vote for him
playing the hospital piano while singing satirical songs!
