E-mail in Fiction

Much has been written, including on this blog, about how new technologies affect, may affect, and will affect the reading experience and the publishing world. What about the Kindle, the Nook, the I-Pad? What about copyright issues for books online? Etcetera. In addition to pondering those questions, I was just recently thinking about how the actual content of fiction has changed with the new technologies. I remember reading, a few years ago, a novel that was largely an ongoing exchange of e-mails among the main characters; this reminded me of the epistolary novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, but the e-mails were much faster, shorter, and more conversational than the letters. And I recently (7/31/10) posted on this blog about the novel "Landing," which is about a trans-Atlantic relationship between two lovers; much of their communication is by phone, text, and, especially, e-mail. This is a relationship that literally could not have existed without access to technology. The couple meets briefly, and only because of e-mail do they develop and continue their relationship. So the evolving technology is not just something that affects the publishing world, and is not even just something that now appears in fiction, but is a force that actually shapes which stories are possible.