Somewhere over the email

I should be sleeping but instead I am watching "You've Got Mail" again. I like the movie, although I'm not sure of what I find to be most appealing about it. The fact the movie's title is derived from AOL's mail system (as well as much of the plot) always disappointed me.

"That is so mundane," I thought. After all, America Online was never well regarded by the majority of non-AOL users (many of whom were ex-AOL users). Still, there was a time -- however brief -- when AOL had more users than the rest of the Internet. Or so it seemed to me.

AOL was once ubiquitous in defining the online experience, despite the fact there were many better options.

What would it take to turn the story of "You've Got Mail" into a science fiction movie? The technology is what Alfred Hitchcock called a "McGuffin". It moves the plot forward without requiring explanation. Think of a Star Trek story where a ship is stranded with a warp drive on the fritz. The engineer may struggle with the warp drive but eventually the ship blows up.

Do we really care about how warp engines work, or do we care about the characters and their real conflicts, the growth they experience? If, as Gene Roddenberry would have intended, we are only concerned about the characters then the warp drive is a McGuffin.

So think of a possible technology that works like email but which takes its place in the story. And maybe the conflict between the characters is not about a megacorporation putting a little bookstore out of business. Maybe it's about a small colony somewhere in space being threatened by an interstellar empire, a change in government, or a supermegacorporation.

The ubiquitous communications system can drive the story forward as the two characters interact with each other on different levels, only gradually realizing that the technology has both brought them together and kept them apart.

Would that not still be science fiction? Or, now that we've seen the story played out over email, is it too late to dream a little dream of things that might yet be?

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