A wrong turn at the last traffic light has led Dorothy into an urban moonscape where anything could happen. The suspense grows when she finds the streetlights smashed on the next block. Eventually, she manages to reach the safety of an all-night Korean grocery store, where the owner lets her telephone the cops.

At least, that's how my author friend wanted the scene to play out. But when he gave it to his wife to read, her reaction was almost scornful: "Why didn't she just call for help on her cellphone?"

"Your wife's got a point," I told him. "If Dorothy's using a Palm Pilot in Chapter 3, she'd also be packing a cute little Motorola or something." What I didn't tell him was that I'd recently faced a similar problem in my own novel: One of my characters was a busy executive who, for plotting purposes, needed to be incommunicado at a luxury resort in Mexico. But of course not, I realized after I rigged up the situation. These days, he'd be checking e-mail every day.

As David Gates noted in a recent essay for Book Forum, even novels written a few years ago may now seem dated when it comes to small details of everyday life. But the situation is direr than that. Baldly put: Today's technology is wreaking havoc on the old-fashioned methods of building plot complications.

A 90-year-old woman collapses in her apartment -- but not before notifying the hospital by pressing the button on her medical-alert bracelet. (And the operation goes fine because the neophyte surgeon is able to simulate the procedure first with sensory-feedback gloves.) The car battery in the Toyota Camry doesn't die when Mona leaves the lights on overnight because they automatically shut off in that model. Despite being away from all his books, Dwight manages to look up the information he needs online. Trouble? Hell, you can't even lose someone in the woods if they have a GPS (global positioning system). And yet, if you're writing about contemporary life, you almost have to include all this technology, or the story doesn't feel real.

Obstacles to communication and travel set up some of the most common types of conflict in fictional narratives. Get rid of them, and the occasion for either comedy or tragedy can vanish as well. If Romeo had left his pager on, what a disaster might have been averted for both him and Juliet! He would have called in for messages, found out about Juliet's trick of feigning death in the tomb with a trance-inducing drug and -- voilą! -- no double suicide. In that case, Shakespeare would have had to resort to some other unfortunate hitch: The tomb might be a dead zone for reception or Romeo could accidentally delete the crucial voice mail from Friar Laurence.

Would Chaucer's pilgrims bound for Canterbury ever have started telling tales to while away the journey if they'd had books on tape?

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"