That the too big, too new, too anonymous, and too private nature of our speedy world didn't always pertain is exactly why the novel struggles on, in severe default, as an arid form of civic communication. Because the basic formula and structure of the novel descends, obviously, from the bygone tradition of oral storytelling, writers of novels are, on some retroactive level, approximating the conditions and features of group communication. Not too very long ago, that good old tradition was metastasized, through diaspora and alienation and a million other highbrow and lowbrow factors, into dictation, and then self-dictation. In the mind's infinitely receding house of mirrors, fiction writers search for the discernible ear, the familiar but discriminating listening of the tribe, which will also be the speaking of the tribe. Yet they can never, ever find the proper audience.
Anonymity is the sounding board confronting writers as they confront the lonely, white blankness.
So novelists just blather on and on and on, transcribing themselves to the singular universe, and hoping someone, anyone, understands. Understanding is hard to come by, if not impossible. Those sad sacks who scribble out fiction are inherently cursed to reiterate and rephrase themselves like nit-picky lunatics yammering away in a vacuum of inattention. The medium of the portrait is language, and the portraiture itself is story. Or something like that.