Yet, even such simple pleasures bring compulsions that take me by surprise. I check my e-mail first thing in the morning and before going to bed at night. I have come to learn that informing myself about new professional problems and demands is not a good way to start or end my day, but my practice unhappily continues. I admitted my ongoing irritation with myself to a friend, a woman in her seventies who has meditated on a biblical reading every morning since she was in her teens. She confessed that it is ever more difficult to begin her spiritual exercises before she checks her e-mail; the discipline to defer opening her inbox is now part of her devotional gesture. And she, too, invites insomnia by checking her e-mail every night before turning in.
Nurturance was the killer app for robotics. Tending the robots incited our engagement. There is a parallel for the networked life. Always on and (now) always with us, we tend the Net, and the Net teaches us to need it.
Online, like MIT’s cyborgs, we feel enhanced; there is a parallel with the robotic moment of more. But in both cases, moments of more may leave us with lives of less. Robotics and connectivity call each other up in tentative symbiosis, parallel pathways to relational retreat. With sociable robots we are alone but receive the signals that tell us we are together. Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed—and only for the parts we find useful, comforting, or amusing.
Once we remove ourselves from the flow of physical, messy, untidy life—and both robotics and networked life do that—we become less willing to get out there and take a chance. A song that became popular on You Tube in 2010, “Do You Want to Date My Avatar?” ends with the lyrics “And if you think I’m not the one, log off, log off and we’ll be done.”
3
Our attraction to even the prospect of sociable robots affords a new view of our networked life. In Part One we saw that when children grow up with fond feelings for sociable robots, they are prepared for the “relationships with less” that the network provides. Now I turn to how the network prepares us for the “relationships with less” that robots provide. These are the unsettling isolations of the tethered self. I have said that tethered to the network through our mobile devices, we approach a new state of the self, itself. For a start, it presumes certain entitlements: It can absent itself from its physical surround—including the people in it. It can experience the physical and virtual in near simultaneity. And it is able to make more time by multitasking, our twenty-first-century alchemy.
THE NEW STATE OF THE SELF: TETHERED AND MARKED ABSENT
These days, being connected depends not on our distance from each other but from available communications technology. Most of the time, we carry that technology with us. In fact, being alone can start to seem like a precondition for being together because it is easier to communicate if you can focus, without interruption, on your screen. In this new regime, a train station (like an airport, a café, or a park) is no longer a communal space but a place of social collection: people come together but do not speak to each other. Each is tethered to a mobile device and to the people and places to which that device serves as a portal. I grew up in Brooklyn where sidewalks had a special look. In every season—even in winter, when snow was scraped away—there were chalk-drawn hopscotch boxes. I speak with a colleague who lives in my old neighborhood. The hopscotch boxes are gone. The kids are out, but they are on their phones.
When people have phone conversations in public spaces, their sense of privacy is sustained by the presumption that those around them will treat them not only as anonymous but as if absent. On a recent train trip from Boston to New York, I sat next to a man talking to his girlfriend about his problems. Here is what I learned by trying not to listen: He’s had a recent bout of heavy drinking, and his father is no longer willing to supplement his income. He thinks his girlfriend spends too much money and he dislikes her teenage daughter. Embarrassed, I walked up and down the aisles to find another seat, but the train was full. Resigned, I returned to my seat next to the complainer. There was some comfort in the fact that he was not complaining to me, but I did wish I could disappear. Perhaps there was no need. I was already being treated as though I were not there.
Or perhaps it makes more sense to think of things the other way around: it is those on the phone who mark themselves as absent. Sometimes people signal their departure by putting a phone to their ear, but it often happens in more subtle ways—there may be a glance down at a mobile device during dinner or a meeting. A “place” used to comprise a physical space and the people within it. What is a place if those who are physically present have their attention on the absent? At a café a block from my home, almost everyone is on a computer or smartphone as they drink their coffee. These people are not my friends, yet somehow I miss their presence.
Our new experience of place is apparent as we travel. Leaving home has always been a way to see one’s own culture anew. But what if, tethered, we bring our homes with us? The director of a program that places American students in Spanish universities once complained to me that her students were not “experiencing Spain.” They spent their free time on Facebook, chatting with their friends from home. I was sympathetic, thinking of the hours I had spent walking with my teenage daughter on a visit to Paris the summer after she first got her mobile phone. As we sat in a café, waiting for a friend to join us for dinner, Rebecca received a call from a schoolmate who asked her to lunch in Boston, six hours behind us in time. My daughter said simply, “Not possible, but how about Friday?” Her friend didn’t even know she was out of town. When I grew up, the idea of the “global village” was an abstraction. My daughter lives something concrete. Emotionally, socially, wherever she goes, she never leaves home. I asked her if she wouldn’t rather experience Paris without continual reminders of Boston. (I left aside the matter that I was a reminder of Boston and she, mercifully, did not raise it.) She told me she was happy; she liked being in touch with her friends. She seemed to barely understand my question. I was wistful, worried that Rebecca was missing an experience I cherished in my youth: an undiluted Paris. My Paris came with the thrill of disconnection from everything I knew. My daughter’s Paris did not include this displacement.
When Rebecca and I returned home from France, I talked about the trip with a close friend, a psychoanalyst. Our discussion led her to reminisce about her first visit to Paris. She was sixteen, travelling with her parents. But while they went sightseeing with her younger brother, she insisted on staying in her hotel room, writing long letters to her boyfriend. Adolescents have always balanced connection and disconnection; we need to acknowledge the familiarity of our needs and the novelty of our circumstances. The Internet is more than old wine in new bottles; now we can always be elsewhere.
In the month after Rebecca and I returned from Paris, I noted how often I was with colleagues who were elsewhere as well: a board meeting where members rebelled when asked to turn off their mobile devices; a faculty meeting where attendees did their e-mail until it was their turn to speak; a conference at which audience members set up Internet back channels in order to chat about speakers’ presentations during the presentations themselves.
4
Since I teach in a university, I find examples of distracted academics of particular interest. But it is the more mundane examples of attention sharing that change the fabric of daily life. Parents check e-mail as they push strollers. Children and parents text during family dinners. As I watched the annual marathon in Florence, Italy, in November 2009, a runner passed me, texting. Of course, I tried to take her picture on my cell phone. After five years, my level of connectivity had finally caught up with my daughter’s. Now when I travel, my access to the Net stays constant. There is security and pleasure in a good hotel on the other side of the world, but it cannot compare to the constancy of online connections.
Research portrays Americans as increasingly insecure, isolated, and lonely.
5
We work more hours than ever before, often at several jobs. Even high school and college students, during seasons of life when time should be most abundant, say that they don’t date but “hook up” because “who has the time?” We have moved away, often far away, from the communities of our birth. We struggle to raise children without the support of extended families. Many have left behind the religious and civic associations that once bound us together.
6
To those who have lost a sense of physical connection, connectivity suggests that you make your own page, your own place. When you are there, you are by definition where you belong, among officially friended friends. To those who feel they have no time, connectivity, like robotics, tempts by proposing substitutions through which you can have companionship with convenience. A robot will always be there, amusing and compliant. On the Net, you can always find someone. “I never want to be far from my BlackBerry,” a colleague told me. “That is where my games are. That is where my sites are. Without it, I’m too anxious.”
Today, our machine dream is to be never alone but always in control. This can’t happen when one is face-to-face with a person. But it can be accomplished with a robot or, as we shall see, by slipping through the portals of a digital life.
THE NEW STATE OF THE SELF: FROM LIFE TO THE LIFE MIX
From the very beginning, networked technologies designed to share practical information were taken up as technologies of relationship. So, for example, the Arpanet, grandfather of the Internet, was developed so that scientists could collaborate on research papers, but it soon became a place to gossip, flirt, and talk about one’s kids. By the mid-1990s, the Internet throbbed with new social worlds. There were chat rooms and bulletin boards and social environments known as multiuser domains, or MUDs. Soon after came massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as Ultima 2 and EverQuest, the precursors of game worlds such as World of Warcraft. In all of these, people created avatars—more or less richly rendered virtual selves—and lived out parallel lives. People sat at their computers and moved from windows that featured the spreadsheets and business documents of the real world to those in which they inhabited online personae. Although the games most often took the form of quests, medieval and otherwise, the virtual environments were most compelling because they offered opportunities for a social life, for performing as the self you wanted to be. As one player on an adventure-style MUD told me in the early 1990s, “I began with an interest in ‘hack and slay,’ but then I stayed to chat.”
7
In the course of a life, we never “graduate” from working on identity; we simply rework it with the materials at hand. From the start, online social worlds provided new materials. Online, the plain represented themselves as glamorous, the old as young, the young as older. Those of modest means wore elaborate virtual jewelry. In virtual space, the crippled walked without crutches, and the shy improved their chances as seducers. These days, online games and worlds are increasingly elaborate. The most popular “pay-to-play” game, World of Warcraft, puts you, along with 11.5 million other players, in the world of Azeroth. There, you control a character, an avatar, whose personality, natural gifts, and acquired skills are under continual development as it takes on a trade, explores the landscape, fights monsters, and goes on quests. In some games, you can play alone—in which case you mostly have artificial intelligences for company, “bots” that play the role of human characters. Or you can band together with other players on the network to conquer new worlds. This can be a highly collaborative endeavor, a social life unto itself: you routinely e-mail, talk to, and message the people you game with.
In a different genre, Second Life is a virtual “place” rather than a game. Here, there is no winning, only living. You begin by naming and building an avatar. You work from a menu with a vast array of choices for its looks and clothes. If these are not sufficient, you can design a customized avatar from scratch. Now, pleased with
your
looks, you have the potential, as Second Life puts it, to live a life that will enable you to “love your life.”
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You can, among other things, get an education, launch a business, buy land, build and furnish a home, and, of course, have a social life that may include love, sex, and marriage. You can even earn money—Second Life currency is convertible into dollars.
As all this unfolds, you hang out in virtual bars, restaurants, and cafés. You relax on virtual beaches and have business meetings in virtual conference rooms. It is not uncommon for people who spend a lot of time on Second Life and role-playing games to say that their online identities make them feel more like themselves than they do in the physical real. This is play, certainly, but it is serious play.
9
Historically, there is nothing new in “playing at” being other. But in the past, such play was dependent on physical displacement. As a teenager I devoured novels about young men and women sent abroad on a Grand Tour to get over unhappy love affairs. In Europe, they “played at” being unscathed by heartbreak. Now, in Weston, Massachusetts, Pete, forty-six, is trying find a life beyond his disappointing marriage. He has only to turn on his iPhone.
I meet Pete on an unseasonably warm Sunday in late autumn. He attends to his two children, four and six, and to his phone, which gives him access to Second Life.
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There, Pete has created an avatar, a buff and handsome young man named Rolo. As Rolo, Pete has courted a female avatar named Jade, a slip of a girl, a pixie with short, spiky blonde hair. As Rolo, he “married” Jade in an elaborate Second Life ceremony more than a year before, surrounded by their virtual best friends. Pete has never met the woman behind the avatar Jade and does not wish to. (It is possible, of course, that the human being behind Jade is a man. Pete understands this but says, “I don’t want to go there.”) Pete describes Jade as intelligent, passionate, and easy to talk to.