See the evolution of texting and the internet on film

Digital communications can be a storyteller’s nightmare: they mean that everyone is constantly connected and that action increasingly happens on a screen, rather than between two actors. No one’s really figured out a perfect way of dealing with that yet — depictions of the internet on film are often fairly hokey, and cutting to a text message on a phone only serves to slow down the action. So what’s a director to do? In the latest in his film analysis series Every Frame a Painting, Tony Zhou takes a look at how filmmakers are slowly beginning to handle text messages and the web better and better. After years and years, Sherlock may just have nailed the text message… but it seems that the web is still anyone’s game.