Mandy presses her point. For her, the hurt of no response follows from what she calls the “formality” of instant messenging. In her circle, instant messages are sent in the evening, when one is working on homework on a laptop or desktop. This presumed social and technical setting compels a certain gravitas. Mandy’s case rests on an argument in the spirit of Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message: if you are at your computer, the medium is formal, and so is the message. If you are running around, shopping, or having a coffee, and you swipe a few keys on your phone to send a text, the medium is informal, and so is the message, no matter how much you may have edited the content.
The defenders of the “nonchalance” of instant messaging stand their ground: when you send an IM, it is going to a person “who has maybe ten things going on.” Even though sitting at a computer, the recipient could well be doing homework, playing games on Facebook, or watching a movie. In all of this noise, your instant message can easily get lost. And sometimes, people stay signed on to instant messenger even though they have left the computer. All of this means, Vera sums up, “that IM can be a lower risk way to test the waters, especially with a boy, than sending a text. You can just send out something without the clear expectation that you will get something back.” Though designed for conversation, IM is also perfect for the noncommittal, for “Whassup.”
All the Richelieu sophomores agree that the thing to avoid is the telephone. Mandy presents a downbeat account of a telephone call: “You wouldn’t want to call because then you would have to get into a conversation.” And conversation, “Well, that’s something where you only want to have them when you want to have them.” For Mandy, this would be “almost never.... It is almost always too prying, it takes too long, and it is impossible to say ‘good-bye.’” She shares Audrey’s problem. Awkward good-byes feel too much like rejection. With texting, she says, “you just ask a question and then it’s over.”
This distaste for the phone crosses genders. A sixteen-year-old boy at Fillmore will not speak on the telephone except when his mother makes him call a relative. “When you text, you have more time to think about what you’re writing. When you talk on the phone, you don’t really think about what you’re saying as much as in a text. On the telephone, too much might show.” He prefers a deliberate performance that can be made to seem spontaneous. This offhand, seeming-not-to-care style has always been an emotional staple of adolescence, but now it is facilitated by digital communication: you send out a feeler; you look like you don’t much care; things happen.
A text message might give the impression of spontaneity to its recipient, but teenagers admit they might spend ten minutes editing its opening line to get it just right. Spencer, a senior at Fillmore, says, “You forget the time you put into it when you get a text message back. You never think that anyone else put thought into theirs. So you sort of forget that you put time into yours.” I ask him if he ever has sent a hastily composed text, and he assures me that this sometimes happens. “But not the ones that really count.... Before I send an important one, I switch it around, a lot.” Deval, one of his classmates, says he is a very fast “thumb typist” and refers to his text messages as “conversations.” One day we meet at noon. By that time, he says, he has “already sent out perhaps a hundred texts,” most of them in two conversational threads. One conversation, Deval explains, “was with my buddy about his game last night. I wasn’t able to go. Another was with my cousin who lives in Montreal, and she was asking about this summer and stuff. I’m going to be going to Canada for college. Since I’m going to be near them next year, she was asking whether I was going to come visit this summer.”
I ask Deval how this conversation by text differs from placing a call to his Montreal cousin. He has spent the better part of the morning texting back and forth to her. Avoiding the phone cannot be about efficient time management. His answer is immediate: “She has an annoying voice.” And besides, he says, “Texting is more direct. You don’t have to use conversation filler.” Their interaction on text “was just information.” Deval says, “She was asking me direct questions; I was giving her direct answers. A long phone conversation with somebody you don’t want to talk to that badly can be a waste of time.”
Texting makes it possible for Deval to have a “conversation” in which he does not have to hear the sound of a voice he finds irritating. He has a way to make plans to live with his cousin during the summer without sharing any pleasantries or showing any interest in her. Both parties are willing to reduce their interchange to a transaction that scheduling software could perform. The software would certainly be comfortable with “no conversation filler” and “just information.”
And yet, Deval does not know if texting is for life. He says that he might, not now, but sometime soon, “force himself” to talk on the phone. “It might be a way to teach yourself to have a conversation . . . For later in life, I’ll need to learn how to have a conversation, learn how to find common ground so I can have something to talk about, rather than spending my life in awkward silence. I feel like phone conversations nowadays will help me in the long run because I’ll be able to have a conversation.” These days, of course, even those who are “later in life” have come to avoid telephone conversations. If you feel that you’re always on call, you start to hide from the rigors of things that unfold in real time.
OVERWHELMED ACROSS THE GENERATIONS
The teenagers I studied were born in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many were introduced to the Internet through America Online when they were only a little past being toddlers. Their parents, however, came to online life as grown-ups. In this domain, they are a generation that, from the beginning, has been playing catch-up with their children. This pattern continues: the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook is adults from thirty-five to forty-four.
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Conventional wisdom stresses how different these adults are from their children—laying out fundamental divides between those who migrated to digital worlds and those who are its “natives.” But the migrants and natives share a lot: perhaps above all, the feeling of being overwhelmed. If teenagers, overwhelmed with demands for academic and sexual performance, have come to treat online life as a place to hide and draw some lines, then their parents, claiming exhaustion, strive to exert greater control over what reaches them. And the only way to filter effectively is to keep most communications online and text based.
So, they are always on, always at work, and always on call. I remember the time, not many years ago, when I celebrated Thanksgiving with a friend and her son, a young lawyer, who had just been given a beeper by his firm. At the time, everyone at the table, including him, joked about the idea of his “legal emergencies.” By the following year, he couldn’t imagine not being in continual contact with the office. There was a time when only physicians had beepers, a “burden” shared in rotation. Now, we have all taken up the burden, reframed as an asset—or as just the way it is.
We are on call for our families as well as our colleagues. On a morning hike in the Berkshires, I fall into step with Hope, forty-seven, a real estate broker from Manhattan. She carries her BlackBerry. Her husband, she says, will probably want to be in touch. And indeed, he calls at thirty-minute intervals. Hope admits, somewhat apologetically, that she is “not fond” of the calls, but she loves her husband, and this is what he needs. She answers her phone religiously until finally a call comes in with spotty reception. “We’re out of range, thank goodness,” she says, as she disables her phone. “I need a rest.”
Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available for calls. It is poignant that people’s thoughts turn to technology when they imagine ways to deal with stresses that they see as having been brought on by technology. They talk of filters and intelligent agents that will handle the messages they don’t want to see. Hope and Audrey, though thirty years apart in age, both see texting as the solution to the “problem” of the telephone. And both redefine “stress” in the same way—as pressure that happens in real time. With this in mind, my hiking partner explains that she is trying to “convert” her husband to texting. There will be more messages; he will be able to send more texts than he can place calls. But she will not have to deal with them “as they happen.”
Mixed feelings about the drumbeat of electronic communication do not suggest any lack of affection toward those with whom we are in touch. But a stream of messages makes it impossible to find moments of solitude, time when other people are showing us neither dependency nor affection. In solitude we don’t reject the world but have the space to think our own thoughts. But if your phone is always with you, seeking solitude can look suspiciously like hiding.
We fill our days with ongoing connection, denying ourselves time to think and dream. Busy to the point of depletion, we make a new Faustian bargain. It goes something like this: if we are left alone when we make contact, we can handle being together.
A thirty-six-year-old nurse at a large Boston hospital begins her day with a visit to her mother. Then she shops for food, cleans the house, and gets ready for work. After an eight-hour shift and dinner, it is after 9 p.m. “I am in no state to socialize,” she says. “I don’t even have the energy to try to track people down by phone. My friends from nursing school are all over the country. I send some e-mails. I log onto Facebook and feel less alone. Even when people are not there, like, exactly when I’m there, it seems like they are there. I have their new pictures, the last thing they were doing. I feel caught up.” A widow of fifty-two grew up on volunteer work and people stopping by for afternoon tea. Now she works full-time as an office manager. Unaccustomed to her new routine, she says she is “somewhat surprised” to find that she has stopped calling friends. She is content to send e-mails and Facebook messages. She says, “A call feels like an intrusion, as though I would be intruding on my friends. But also, if they call me, I feel they are intruding... After work—I want to go home, look at some photos from the grandchildren on Facebook, send some e-mails and feel in touch. I’m tired. I’m not ready for people—I mean people in person.” Both women feel put upon by what used to be sustaining, a telephone call. Its design flaw: it can only happen in real time. The flight to e-mail begins as a “solution” to fatigue. It ends with people having a hard time summoning themselves for a telephone call, and certainly not for “people in person.”
Dan, a law professor in his mid-fifties, explains that he never “interrupts” his colleagues at work. He does not call; he does not ask to see them. He says, “They might be working, doing something. It might be a bad time.” I ask him if this behavior is new. He says, “Oh, yes, we used to hang out. It was nice.” He reconciles his view that once collegial behavior now constitutes interruption by saying, “People are busier now.” But then he pauses and corrects himself. “I’m not being completely honest here: it’s also that
I
don’t want to talk to people now.
I
don’t want to be interrupted. I think I should want to, it would be nice, but it is easier to deal with people on my BlackBerry.”
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This widespread attitude makes things hard for Hugh, twenty-five, who says that he “needs more than e-mails and Facebook can provide.” If his friends don’t have time to see him, he wants them to talk to him on the phone so that he can have “the full attention of the whole person.” But when he texts his friends to arrange a call, Hugh says that he has to make his intentions clear: he wants “private cell time.” He explains, “This is time when the person you are calling makes a commitment that they will not take calls from other people. They are not doing anything else.” He says he feels most rejected when, while speaking on the phone with a friend, he becomes aware that his friend is also texting or on Facebook, something that happens frequently. “I don’t even want them to be walking. I can’t have a serious conversation with someone while they are on their way from one sales meeting to another. Private cell time is the hardest thing to get. People don’t want to make the commitment.”
Some young people—aficionados of the text message and the call to “touch base”—echo Hugh’s sentiments about the difficulty of getting “full attention.” One sixteen-year-old boy says, “I say to people, talk to
me.
Now is my time.” Another tries to get his friends to call him from landlines because it means they are in one place as they speak to him, and the reception will be clear. He says, “The best is when you can get someone to call you back on a landline.... That is the best.” Talking on a landline with no interruptions used to be an everyday thing. Now it is exotic, the jewel in the crown.
Hugh says that recently, when he does get private cell time, he comes to regret it. By demanding that people be sitting down, with nothing to do but chat with him, he has raised the bar too high: “They’re disappointed if I’m, like, not talking about being depressed, about contemplating a divorce, about being fired.” Hugh laughs. “You ask for private cell time, you better come up with the goods.”
The barrier to making a call is so high that even when people have something important to share, they hold back. Tara, the lawyer who admits to “processing” her friends by dealing with them on e-mail, tells me a story about a friendship undermined. About four times a year, Tara has dinner with Alice, a classmate from law school. Recently, the two women exchanged multiple emails trying to set a date. Finally, after many false starts, they settled on a time and a restaurant. Alice did not come to the dinner with good news. Her sister had died. Though they lived thousands of miles apart, the sisters had spoken once a day. Without her sister, without these calls, Alice feels ungrounded.