How do you write about life when it's lived on computers?

Fiction writers face a challenge in depicting the ubiquitous 21st-century experience of virtual existence
iPhone fans
Different headspace ... A Tokyo queue to buy the latest iPhone. Photograph: ZUMA Wire Service/Alamy

We live more and more of our life through the screens of laptops and smartphones, but how do we represent this on the page? In his 2004 novel Eastern Standard Tribe, science fiction author Cory Doctorow explored what it meant to live in a world where our relationships were scattered around the globe, and our lives lived through computers. Doctorow's novel was published just two years before the release of the iPhone in 2006, and the explosion in smartphone and tablet computer usage which has moved millions of real people are living the kinds of life Doctorow predicted.

Walk in to any public space today, from a waiting room to a coffee shop, and note the disturbing absence of voices. We are there, and we are elsewhere. Our discussions are mediated via social networks, and conducted through touchscreen interfaces. Can we call them friends, this network of professional and social contacts we interact with through computers?

Journalist and chronicler of hacker culture Quinn Norton describes an aesthetic crisis in writing "(H)ow do we write emotionally of scenes involving computers? How do we make concrete, or at least reconstructable in the minds of our readers, the terrible, true passions that cross telephony lines?" In a digital world do falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms all look the same? Do they all look like typing? And is capturing them on paper, as Robin Sloan claims, the great challenge for writers today?

You by Austin Grossman is a novel that depicts scenes involving computers with emotion. It is also, arguably, the first literary product of gamer culture, and a significant addition to the canon of geek lit. The novel delves in to the world of Black Arts, a successful game design studio in the late 1990s, and into the virtual worlds they create. Russell grew up with video games, but chose to abandon his geek identity and become a hot shot lawyer. With his imploded career behind him, Russell rejoins his adolescent friends who have made their fortunes making games at Black Arts.

Themes of adolescent friendships haunting our adult life are shared with Grossman's debut Soon I Will Be Invincible, a postmodern superhero yarn. You is a more subdued, less bombastic follow-up, and a more thoughtful and significant one. The bookturns on the attempt by Russell and his friends to build the ultimate game, a simulation so real they could enter into it like life itself, a goal that Grossman spins as the gamer generation's equivalent to the counterculture. "This was our rebellion. We could walk out on reality itself and the raw deal it gives even the luckiest of us. Fucking leave it and go on an adventure."

The desire to escape reality. To construct our own reality in the games of childhood, and say F* you to the artifice of the adult world. The desire to be the hero of the adventure. These are the emblems of geek culture. It's why the escapist potential of fantasy, and of video games to fulfil those fantasies, are so central to it. And it's the same desire for escape driving millions of us to our iPhones, to chat with our online friends, and be at the heart of a world of our own making in place of whatever adult situations in which we're physically present.

But the digital world is really no escape at all. When Paul Miller left the internet a year ago, he was expressing the same desire to "unplug" that many of us feel when faced with 800 unanswered emails and as many angry status updates on Facebook. But all Miller discovered was that the fantasy of a de-digitalled world revealing a deeper and richer reality was just that; a fantasy.

William Gibson described cyberspace in Neuromancer as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions". Gibson's cyberspace was inspired by early video games, but 30 years after it was written remains the most potent description of lives lived via computers. As Gibson has since argued, cyberspace isn't another space, it isn't inside computers. It is reality, but with the dreamlike, hallucinatory quality that now we can talk to anyone and everyone, in any place.

The challenge of writing about lives lived via computers might become redundant, as the illusory barriers between real life and digital life come tumbling down. Sergey Brin called the smartphone "emasculating" when launching Google Glass, which promises to project our digital lives directly in to our eyes. Once sending a tweet around the world becomes the same act as talking to a friend across a coffee shop table, how will we distinguish one from the other in life, let alone in writing?