Tara, a fifty-five-year-old lawyer who juggles children, a job, and a new marriage, makes a similar point: “When you ask for a call, the expectation is that you have pumped it up a level. People say to themselves: ‘It’s urgent or she would have sent an e-mail.’” So Tara avoids the telephone. She wants to meet with friends in person; e-mail is for setting up these meetings. “That is what is most efficient,” she says. But efficiency has its downside. Business meetings have agendas, but friends have unscheduled needs. In friendship, things can’t always wait. Tara knows this; she feels guilty and she experiences a loss: “I’m at the point where I’m processing my friends as though they were items of inventory . . . or clients.”
Leonora, fifty-seven, a professor of chemistry, reflects on her similar practice: “I use e-mail to make appointments to see friends, but I’m so busy that I’m often making an appointment one or two months in the future. After we set things up by e-mail, we do not call. Really. I don’t call. They don’t call. They feel that they have their appointment. What do I feel? I feel I have ‘taken care of that person.’” Leonora’s pained tone makes it clear that by “taken care of” she means that she has crossed someone off a to-do list. Tara and Leonora are discontent but do not feel they have a choice. This is where technology has brought them. They subscribe to a new etiquette, claiming the need for efficiency in a realm where efficiency is costly.
AUDREY: A LIFE ON THE SCREEN
We met Audrey, sixteen, a Roosevelt junior who talked about her Facebook profile as “the avatar of me.” She is one of Elaine’s shy friends who prefers texting to talking. She is never without her phone, sometimes using it to text even as she instant-messages at an open computer screen. Audrey feels lonely in her family. She has an older brother in medical school and a second, younger brother, just two years old. Her parents are divorced, and she lives half time with each of them. Their homes are about a forty-five-minute drive apart. This means that Audrey spends a lot of time on the road. “On the road,” she says. “That’s daily life.” She sees her phone as the glue that ties her life together. Her mother calls her to pass on a message to her father. Her father does the same. Audrey says, “They call me to say, ‘Tell your mom this.... Make sure your dad knows that.’ I use the cell to pull it together.” Audrey sums up the situation: “My parents use me and my cell like instant messenger. I am their IM.”
Like so many other children who tell me similar stories, Audrey complains of her mother’s inattention when she picks her up at school or after sports practice. At these times, Audrey says, her mother is usually focused on her cell phone, either texting or talking to her friends. Audrey describes the scene: she comes out of the gym exhausted, carrying heavy gear. Her mother sits in her beaten-up SUV, immersed in her cell, and doesn’t even look up until Audrey opens the car door. Sometimes her mother will make eye contact but remain engrossed with the phone as they begin the drive home. Audrey says, “It gets between us, but it’s hopeless. She’s not going to give it up. Like, it could have been four days since I last spoke to her, then I sit in the car and wait in silence until she’s done.”
3
Audrey has a fantasy of her mother, waiting for her, expectant, without a phone. But Audrey is resigned that this is not to be and feels she must temper her criticism of her mother because of her own habit of texting when she is with her friends. Audrey does everything she can to avoid a call.
4
“The phone, it’s awkward. I don’t see the point. Too much just a recap and sharing feelings. With a text . . . I can answer on my own time. I can respond. I can ignore it. So it really works with my mood. I’m not bound to anything, no commitment.... I have control over the conversation and also more control over what I say.”
Texting offers protection:
Nothing will get spat at you. You have time to think and prepare what you’re going to say, to make you appear like that’s just the way you are. There’s planning involved, so you can control how you’re portrayed to this person, because you’re choosing these words, editing it before you send it.... When you instant-message you can cross things out, edit what you say, block a person, or sign off. A phone conversation is a lot of pressure. You’re always expected to uphold it, to keep it going, and that’s too much pressure.... You have to just keep going . . . “Oh, how was your day?” You’re trying to think of something else to say real fast so the conversation doesn’t die out.
Then Audrey makes up a new word. A text, she argues, is better than a call because in a call “there is a lot less
boundness
to the person.” By this she means that in a call, she could learn too much or say too much, and things could get “out of control.” A call has insufficient boundaries. She admits that “later in life I’m going to need to talk to people on the phone.
But not now
.” When texting, she feels at a reassuring distance. If things start to go in a direction she doesn’t like, she can easily redirect the conversation—or cut it off: “In texting, you get your main points off; you can really control when you want the conversation to start and end. You say, ‘Got to go, bye.’ You just do it ... much better than the long drawn-out good-byes, when you have no real reason to leave, but you want to end the conversation.” This last is what Audrey likes least—the end of conversations. A phone call, she explains, requires the skill to end a conversation “when you have no real reason to leave.... It’s not like there is a reason. You just want to. I don’t know how to do that.
I don’t want to learn
.”
Ending a call is hard for Audrey because she experiences separation as rejection; she projects onto others the pang of abandonment she feels when someone ends a conversation with her. Feeling unthreatened when someone wants to end a conversation may seem a small thing, but it is not. It calls upon a sense of self-worth; one needs to be at a place where Audrey has not arrived. It is easier to avoid the phone; its beginnings and endings are too rough on her.
Audrey is not alone in this. Among her friends, phone calls are infrequent, and she says, “Face-to-face conversations happen way less than they did before. It’s always, ‘Oh, talk to you online.’” This means, she explains, that things happen online that “should happen in person . . . Friendships get broken. I’ve had someone ask me out in a text message. I’ve had someone break up with me online.” But Audrey is resigned to such costs and focuses on the bounties of online life.
One of Audrey’s current enthusiasms is playing a more social, even flirtatious version of herself in online worlds. “I’d like to be more like I am online,” she says. As we’ve seen, for Audrey, building an online avatar is not so different from writing a social-networking profile. An avatar, she explains, “is a Facebook profile come to life.” And avatars and profiles have a lot in common with the everyday experiences of texting and instant messaging. In all of these, as she sees it, the point is to do “a performance of you.”
Making an avatar and texting. Pretty much the same. You’re creating your own person; you don’t have to think of things on the spot really, which a lot of people can’t really do. You’re creating your own little ideal person and sending it out. Also on the Internet, with sites like MySpace and Facebook, you put up the things you like about yourself, and you’re not going to advertise the bad aspects of you.
You’re not going to post pictures of how you look every day. You’re going to get your makeup on, put on your cute little outfit, you’re going to take your picture and post it up as your default, and that’s what people are going to expect that you are every day, when really you’re making it up for all these people.... You can write anything about yourself; these people don’t know. You can create who you want to be. You can say what kind of stereotype mold you want to fit in without ... maybe in real life it won’t work for you, you can’t pull it off. But you can pull it off on the Internet.
Audrey has her cell phone and its camera with her all day; all day she takes pictures and posts them to Facebook. She boasts that she has far more Facebook photo albums than any of her friends. “I like to feel,” she says, “that my life is up there.” But, of course, what is up on Facebook is her edited life. Audrey is preoccupied about which photographs to post. Which put her in the best light? Which show her as a “bad” girl in potentially appealing ways? If identity play is the work of adolescence, Audrey is at work all day: “If Facebook were deleted, I’d be deleted.... All my memories would probably go along with it. And other people have posted pictures of me. All of that would be lost. If Facebook were undone, I might actually freak out.... That is where I am. It’s part of your life. It’s a second you.” It is at this point that Audrey says of a Facebook avatar: “It’s your little twin on the Internet.”
Since Audrey is constantly reshaping this “twin,” she wonders what happens to the elements of her twin that she edits away. “What does Facebook do with pictures you put on and then take off?” She suspects that they stay on the Internet forever, an idea she finds both troubling and comforting. If everything is archived, Audrey worries that she will never be able to escape the Internet twin. That thought is not so nice. But if everything is archived, at least in fantasy, she will never have to give her up. That thought is kind of nice.
On Facebook, Audrey works on the twin, and the twin works on her. She describes her relationship to the site as a “give-and-take.” Here’s how it works: Audrey tries out a “flirty” style. She receives a good response from Facebook friends, and so she ramps up the flirtatious tone. She tries out “an ironic, witty” tone in her wall posts. The response is not so good, and she retreats. Audrey uses the same kind of tinkering as she experiments with her avatars in virtual worlds. She builds a first version to “put something out there.” Then comes months of adjusting, of “seeing the new kinds of people I can hang with” by changing how she represents herself. Change your avatar, change your world.
Audrey says that her online avatars boost her real-life confidence. Like many other young women on Second Life, Audrey makes her avatar more conventionally attractive than she is in the real. Audrey is a pretty girl, with long red hair, styled in a single braid down her back. Her braid and her preference for floral prints give her an old-fashioned look. On Second Life, Audrey’s hair is modern and blunt cut, her body more developed, her makeup heavier, her clothes more suggestive. There are no floral prints. A promotional video for the game asserts that this is a place to “connect, shop, work, love, explore, be different, free yourself, free your mind, change your looks, love your looks, love your life.”
5
But is loving your life as an avatar the same as loving your life in the real? For Audrey, as for many of her peers, the answer is unequivocally yes. Online life is practice to make the rest of life better, but it is also a pleasure in itself. Teenagers spend hours depleting allowances, shopping for clothes and shoes for their online selves. These virtual goods have real utility; they are required for avatars with full social lives.
Despite her enthusiasm for Second Life, Audrey’s most emotional online experience has taken place on MySpace—or more precisely, on Italian MySpace. During her sophomore year at Roosevelt, Audrey met a group of Italian exchange students. They introduced her to the site. At that point, Audrey had taken one year of high school Italian, just enough to build a profile with some help from her friends. She admits that this profile bears only a glancing relationship to the truth. On Italian MySpace, Audrey is older and more experienced. When her profile went up, a lot of men sent her messages in Italian. She found this thrilling and responded enthusiastically. The game was on. Now, a year later, it continues: “I message back in the little Italian that I know. I don’t usually respond to those things, but since I figure my real information isn’t on there, and they’re in Italy and I’m in America, why not? It’s fun to step outside yourself. You can’t really do this with your friends in real life.” For Audrey, Italian MySpace is like chat rooms: “You do it with people you’re never going to speak to or assume you’re never going to speak to.”
Audrey’s focus on “people you’re never going to speak to” brings to mind once again how Erik Erikson thought about the moratorium necessary for adolescent development. Writing in the 1950s and early 1960s, he could think of the American “high school years” as offering this relatively consequence-free environment.
6
These days, high school is presented to its students and their parents as anything but consequence free. Audrey is in a highly competitive college preparatory program—the fast track in her high school—and is continually reminded of the consequences of every grade, every SAT score, every extracurricular choice. She thinks of her high school experience as time in a professional school where she trains to get into college. Real life provides little space for consequence-free identity play, but Italian MySpace provides a great deal.
Long after the Italian exchange students are gone, Audrey keeps her page on Italian MySpace. As she talks about its pleasures, I think of my first trip to Europe in the summer after my sophomore year in college. In its spirit, my behavior in the real was not so different from Audrey’s in the virtual. I hitchhiked from Paris to Rome, against my parents’ clear instructions. I left everything about my identity behind except for being a nineteen-year-old American. I saw no reason for anyone to know me as a serious, academically disciplined student. I preferred to simply be nineteen. I never lied, but I never told any of the young Romans I hung around with that I wasn’t simply a lighthearted coed. Indeed, during that summer of not quite being me, it was not so clear that I was not a lighthearted coed. My Roman holiday only worked if I didn’t bring my new Italian friends into the rest of my life. Audrey, too, needs to compartmentalize. On Italian MySpace she cultivates friendships that she keeps separate from her “real” American Facebook account.