Trained psychoanalytically, I am primed not to ask what is true but what things mean. That doesn’t suggest that truth is unimportant, but it does say that fantasies and wishes carry their own significant messages. But this perspective depends on listening to a person, in person. It depends on getting to know that person’s life history, his or her struggles with family, friendship, sexuality, and loss. On the Internet, I feel an unaccustomed desire to know if someone is telling “the truth.”
A good therapy helps you develop a sense of irony about your life so that when you start to repeat old and unhelpful patterns, something within you says, “There you go again; let’s call this to a halt. You can do something different.” Often the first step toward doing something different is developing the capacity to not act, to stay still and reflect. Online confession keeps you moving. You’ve done your job. You’ve gotten your story out. You’re ready for your responses. We did not need the invention of online confessional sites to keep us busy with ways to externalize our problems instead of looking at them. But among all of its bounties, here the Internet has given us a new way not to think.
I grant that confessional sites leave some people feeling better for “venting” and knowing that, in their misery, they are not alone. But here is how they leave me: I am anxious about my inability to help. I feel connected to these people and their stories, but I realize that to keep reading, I must inure myself to what is before my eyes. Certain kinds of confessions (and, unfortunately, some of the most brutal ones) start to read like formulaic writing in well-known genres. When this happens, I start to tune out and then feel terribly upset. I think of Joel on Second Life and his doubts about Noelle’s really being suicidal. Am I watching a performance? Or, more probably, how much performance am I watching? Am I becoming coarsened, or am I being realistic?
CHAPTER 13
Anxiety
M
arcia, sixteen, a sophomore at Silver Academy, has her own problems. “Right now,” she says, on-screen life “is too much to bear.” She doesn’t like what the Internet brings out in her—certainly not her better angels. Online, she gives herself “permission to say mean things.” She says, “You don’t have to say it to a person. You don’t see their reaction or anything, and it’s like you’re talking to a computer screen so you don’t see how you’re hurting them. You can say whatever you want, because you’re home and they can’t do anything.” Drea, a classmate sitting next to her, quips, “Not if they know where you live,” but Marcia doesn’t want to be taken lightly. She has found herself being cruel, many times. She ends the conversation abruptly: “You don’t see the impact that what you say has on anyone else.”
Marcia and Drea are part of a group of Silver Academy sophomores with whom I am talking about the etiquette of online life. Zeke says that he had created “fake” identities on MySpace. He scanned in pictures from magazines and wrote profiles for imaginary people. Then, he used their identities to begin conversations about himself, very critical conversations, and he could see who joined in. This is a way, he says, “to find out if people hate you.” This practice, not unusual at Silver, creates high anxiety. Zeke’s story reminds me of John, also at Silver and also sixteen, who delegated his texting to digitally fluent Cyranos. When John told his story to his classmates, it sparked a fretful conversation about how you never really know who is on the other end when you send or receive a text. Now, after hearing Zeke’s story, Carol picks up this theme. “You never know,” she says, “who you might be talking to. A kid could start a conversation about your friend, but you have to be careful. It could
be
your friend. On MySpace ... you can get into a
lot
of trouble.”
Others join the discussion of “trouble.” One says, “Facebook has taken over my life.” She is unable to log off. “So,” she says, “I find myself looking at random people’s photos, or going to random things. Then I realize after that it was a waste of time.” A second says she is afraid she will “miss something” and cannot put down her phone. Also, “it has a camera. It has the time. I can always be with my friends. Not having your phone is a high level of stress.” A third sums up all she has heard: “Technology is bad because people are not as strong as its pull.”
Anxiety is part of the new connectivity. Yet, it is often the missing term when we talk about the revolution in mobile communications. Our habitual narratives about technology begin with respectful disparagement of what came before and move on to idealize the new. So, for example, online reading, with its links and hypertext possibilities, often receives a heroic, triumphalist narrative, while the book is disparaged as “disconnected.” That narrative goes something like this: the old reading was linear and exclusionary; the new reading is democratic as every text opens out to linked pages—chains of new ideas.
1
But this, of course, is only one story, the one technology wants to tell. There is another story. The book is connected to daydreams and personal associations as readers look within themselves. Online reading—at least for the high school and college students I have studied—always invites you elsewhere.
2
And it is only sometimes interrupted by linking to reference works and associated commentaries. More often, it is broken up by messaging, shopping, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. This “other story” is complex and human. But it is not part of the triumphalist narrative in which every new technological affordance meets an opportunity, never a vulnerability, never an anxiety.
There were similar idealizations when it became clear that networked computers facilitated human multitasking. Educators were quick to extol the virtues of doing many things at once: it was how the future wanted us to think. Now we know that multitasking degrades performance on everything we try to accomplish. We will surely continue to multitask, deciding to trade optimum performance for the economies of doing many things at once. But online multitasking, like online reading, can be a useful choice without inspiring a heroic narrative.
We have to love our technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves enough to confront technology’s true effects on us. These amended narratives are a kind of
realtechnik.
The
realtechnik
of connectivity culture is about possibilities and fulfillment, but it also about the problems and dislocations of the tethered self. Technology helps us manage life stresses but generates anxieties of its own. The two are often closely linked.
So, for example, mobile connections help adolescents deal with the difficulties of separation. When you leave home with a cell phone, you are not as cut off as before, and you can work through separation in smaller steps. But now you may find yourself in text contact with your parents all day. And your friends, too, are always around. You come to enjoy the feeling of never having to be alone. Feeling a bit stranded used to be considered a part of adolescence, and one that developed inner resources. Now it is something that the network makes it possible to bypass. Teenagers say that they want to keep their cell phones close, and once it is with you, you can always “find someone.”
Sometimes teenagers use the network to stay in contact with the people they “know for real,” but what of online friends? Who are they to you? You may never have met them, yet you walk the halls of your school preoccupied with what you will say to them. You are stalked on Facebook but cannot imagine leaving because you feel that your life is there. And you, too, have become a Facebook stalker. Facebook feels like “home,” but you know that it puts you in a public square with a surveillance camera turned on. You struggle to be accepted in an online clique. But it is characterized by its cruel wit, and you need to watch what you say. These adolescent posts will remain online for a lifetime, just as those you “friend” on Facebook will never go away. Anxieties migrate, proliferate.
RISK MANAGEMENT
We have met Julia, sixteen, a sophomore at Branscomb High School for whom texting was a way to acknowledge, even discover, her feelings. An only child, her mother had a heart condition, and Julia spent her early years living with her aunt. When Julia was nine, her mother underwent successful surgery, and Julia was able to move in with her and a new stepfather. When this marriage dissolved, she and her mother set off on their own. Her health restored, Julia’s mother put herself through college and now runs a small employment agency.
When she was younger, Julia saw her father once a week. But he wanted more and blamed Julia for the infrequency of their visits. She felt caught between her parents. “So,” she now says, “I stopped calling him.” Of course, as is often the case in such matters, when Julia stopped calling her father, she wanted desperately for him to call her. “I wanted him to call me, but he didn’t want to call me.... But if I called him, he would blame me for not talking to him enough.” And so their relationship trailed off in bad feelings all around: “It was just like we hadn’t been talking to each other as much. And the less we talked, the less we saw of each other, and one day it just stopped completely.” For the past four years Julia hasn’t seen or spoken to her father.
I meet Julia at a possible turning point. Over winter break, she plans to go on a school-sponsored trip to work at an orphanage in Guatemala. To participate she needs both of her parents’ signatures on a permission document. Julia is very nervous that her father won’t sign the form (“I just haven’t spoken to him in so long”), but in the end, he does and sends her a note that includes his e-mail address. When I meet Julia she is excited and apprehensive: “So, he sent a letter with the signature for my passport, saying he was sorry, and he’d like to keep in touch now. So, I’m gonna start talking to him more.... I’m going to try to talk to him through e-mail.” Julia is not ready to speak to her father. For her that would be too great a jump—perhaps for her father as well. He did not, after all, send her his telephone number. E-mail was offered as a way to talk without speaking. “E-mail is perfect,” Julia says. “We have to build up. If we talk awhile on the computer, then I can call him and then maybe go and see him.” As Julia talks about this plan, she nods frequently. It feels right.
Julia knows another way to reach her father: he has a MySpace account. However, she explains that there was “no way” she would ever contact him through it. For one thing, Julia is upset that her father even has the account: “It doesn’t seem like something a grown-up should have.” What’s more, to become her father’s MySpace friend would give him too much access to her personal life, and she would have too much information about him. She is not sure she could resist the temptation to “stalk” him—to use the social-networking site to follow his comings and goings without his knowledge. When you’re stalking, you follow links, moving from the postings of your prey to those of their friends. You look at photographs of parties and family events at which your prey might be a guest. To whom are they talking? Julia worries that she would try to investigate whether her father was seeing a new woman.
Despite all of this, Julia cannot not help herself from looking up her father’s extended family on MySpace—his parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles. She says she is not going to contact any of them, at least not until she e-mails her father. She wonders if MySpace might be a way to take small steps to knit together what had been torn apart in her childhood. And how might she talk about any of this with her mother?
As she describes a call to her father as “too much,” Julia plays with her new cell phone. She has chosen one with a flip-up keyboard, optimized for texting. “I begged for this,” she says. Julia texts her friends many times a day, almost constantly when she is not in class. Julia has to be careful. She explains that if she texts people on Verizon, where she has her account, the texts are free. Texting people on other carriers costs money. “I wish all my friends had Verizon,” she says wistfully. Julia has a best friend on Cingular (a rival service), and says, “We don’t text together.” The solution: “We talk at school.” Julia makes it clear that this is not a happy outcome.
I ask Julia about telephone calls. She doesn’t like them at all. “I feel weird talking on the phone. My friends call and say, ‘What’s up?’ and I’ll say, ‘Nothing.’ Then I’ll say, ‘Okay, I gotta go. Bye.’ I feel awkward talking on the phone. I just think it’s easier to text.” Julia’s phone is always with her. If she is in class and a text arrives, Julia asks to go to the bathroom to check it out. The texts come in all day, with at least one vibration every five minutes. Knowing she has a message makes her “antsy.” She starts to worry. She needs to read the message. Julia tells me that when she goes to the bathroom to check her texts, they are often from people just saying hello. She says, “This makes me feel foolish for having been so scared.”
With Julia’s permission, one of her teachers has been listening to our conversation about the phone. She asks, sensibly, “Why don’t you turn it off?” Julia’s answer is immediate: “It might be my mother. There might be an emergency.” Her teacher persists gently: “But couldn’t your mom call the school?” Julia does not hesitate: “Yeah, but what if it was one of my other friends having the emergency right in school?”
Julia describes the kinds of emergencies that compel her to respond to any signal from her phone. She talks about a hypothetical situation with a “friend” (later Julia will admit that she was describing herself): “Let’s say she got into trouble. She knows she didn’t do something, but she needs to tell somebody, she needs to tell me. Or, I know this one sounds kind of silly, but if she was having friend or boy trouble, she’d text me or call me. So those are the kind of things.” Having a feeling without being able to share it is considered so difficult that it constitutes an “emergency.”