I have been wondering how do people start building some interweb/online environments for their stories if it's in big role in the story? I think some basics are clear to anyone, but are there some different angles you go by? Do you reflect your experiences on the real world interwebs or do you just write something fictional just like Henning Mankell's Firewall. In which there was just a scratch of truth about the things involved. What is your take? Do you think this forum, for example, as good reference to your writing? How on earth I do write those reviews?
I usually base fictional sites off one or two forums/wikis/news sites I've found on the real Internet. No end of colorful specimens.
The internet isn’t too important in my story, but it exists. My story is a space western, so many of the smaller planets don’t have enough people to create an Internet as large as ours. Nor can they afford fancy VR gear. They do have old copies of the gallactic Wikipedia from elsewhere though, and their own local websites. There are some excellent depictions of the Internet in fiction that one can draw from. The ones I like in particular are Futurama’s Internet, where they put on VR suits and are inundated with ads, and Ready Player One, which is kind of like the MMO version of that. I’ve read a few interesting stories that put the POV inside a VR space. At that point it’s just like telling any other story, with kind of a frame story of the outside world affecting it too. The unisphere from the commonwealth series is cool. It’s basically like the modern internet, but I think they use more AIs and voice interfaces to interact with it. Not our barbaric keyboards and mouses. In general people act like normal human beings on forums, with the adding element of emotional detachment which makes it easier for them to not understand each other, or to engage in really phony or rude behavior. If you write online interactions as being more hollow, I think it will ring true. That is one reason to be careful when putting the internet in your story’s spotlight, without VR. And even characters in VR internets can have masks. Though that is an interesting element too, isn’t it?
I try to avoid getting too deep into the internet when I'm writing. Characters will do things online, but they're always doing generic messaging, searching, and faffing about on forums, etc. One of the last things I really want is for a story to get seriously dated before it even gets to print. If you want an example of what I mean, just check out one of the many internet thrillers that came out in the early 2000's. Can't think of any? Yeah, there's a reason for that.
