Or something might happen to Joe, the father of her best friend Heather. Joe has had multiple heart attacks. “They told him if he has another one he’ll probably die. So I’m always like, in my pocket, waiting for a call. Heather would either call me, or her mom would call me. ’Cause I’m really close to their family. Her dad’s like my dad. And I love him.... So something like that would be an emergency.”
Julia shows me her cell phone emergency contact list, which includes Heather, Heather’s parents, and all of Heather’s siblings. Julia says that she used to have Heather’s uncle and aunt on her emergency list as well, “but I got a new phone and I don’t have them anymore.” She makes a note to get their numbers for her new phone. Along with her mother, these people are her safety net. Her cell phone embodies their presence.
Julia, her life marked by transitions and separations, always fears disconnection. She is poised to mourn. People can leave or be taken from her at any time. Her phone is tied up with a kind of magical thinking that if she can be in touch, the people she loves will not disappear.
3
Julia’s phone, a symbol of connection in a world on the brink, goes some distance toward making her feel safe. She says, “If there was ever an emergency in the school, I could always call 911, or if something happened, if there was a fire, or some strange guy came into the school I could always call my mom to tell her that I was okay, or not okay. So it’s good like that too.” As Julia talks about her anxieties of disconnection, she begins to talk about the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. When I interview teenagers about cell phones, I often hear stories about 9/11. Remembered through the prism of connectivity, 9/11 was a day when they could not be in touch. Many teachers and school administrators, in that generation that grew up hiding under desks in fear of an atomic attack, reacted to the news of the Twin Towers’ collapse by isolating the children under their care. Students were taken out of classrooms and put in basements, the iconic hiding places of the Cold War. On 9/11 Julia spent many hours in such an improvised quarantine. Frightened, she and her classmates had no way to contact their parents. “I was in fourth grade,” she said. “I didn’t have a cell phone then. I needed to talk to my mother.”
For Julia, 9/11 was all the more frightening because one of the girls in her class had an aunt who worked in the World Trade Center. And one of the boys had a relative who was supposed to be flying that day, but he didn’t know to where. Only later in the afternoon, with communication restored, did Julia and her friends learn that everyone they had worried about was safe.
It was scary ’cause my teachers didn’t know what was going on, and they all brought us into a room, and they didn’t really know what to tell us. They just told us that there were bad guys bombing, crashing planes into buildings. We would ask questions, but they didn’t know how to answer. We asked if they caught the bad guys. And our teacher said, “Yeah, they are in jail.” But none of them could have been in jail because they crashed the plane. So our teachers really didn’t know what was going on either.
The trauma of 9/11 is part of the story of connectivity culture. After the bombing of the World Trade Center, Americans accepted an unprecedented level of surveillance of both their persons and their communications. For Julia’s generation, 9/11 marked childhood with an experience of being cut off from all comfort. In its shadow, cell phones became a symbol of physical and emotional safety. After the bombing of the World Trade Center, parents who really had not seen the point of giving cell phones to their children discovered a reason: continual contact. Julia took from her experience of 9/11 the conviction that it is “always good” to have your cell phone with you.
At schools all over the country, this is just what teachers try to discourage. They are in a tough spot because students are getting mixed messages. When parents give children phones, there is an implied message: “I love you, and this will make you safe. I give this to you because I care.” Then schools want to take the phone away.
4
Some schools demand that phones be silenced and kept out of sight. Others ban them to locker rooms. At Julia’s school, teachers try to convince students that they don’t need their phones with them at all times. Julia quotes her teachers derisively: “They say, ‘Oh, there’s a phone in every classroom.’” But Julia makes it clear that she is having none of it: “I feel safer with my own phone. Because we can’t all be using the same phone at once.” This is a new nonnegotiable: to feel safe, you have to be connected. “If I got in a fight with somebody, I’d call my friend. I’d tell my friend if I got in trouble with the teacher. I’d tell my friend if there was a fight and I was scared. If I was threatened, I’d tell my friends. Or if someone came in and had a knife, I’d text my friends.” For all of these imagined possibilities, the phone is comfort. Branscomb High School has metal detectors at its entrance. Uniformed security guards patrol the halls. There have been flare-ups; students have gotten into fights. As she and I speak, Julia’s thoughts turn to Columbine and Virginia Tech: “I’m reading a book right now about a school.... It’s about two kids who brought a gun to a dance and keep everyone hostage, and then killed themselves. And it’s a lot like Columbine.... We had an assembly about Columbine just recently.... At a time like that, I’d need my cell phone.”
We read much about “helicopter parents.”
5
They hail from a generation that does not want to repeat the mistakes of its parents (permitting too much independence too soon) and so hover over their children’s lives. But today our children hover as well. They avoid disconnection at all cost. Some, like Julia, have divorced parents. Some have families broken twice or three times. Some have parents who support their families by working out of state or out of the country. Some have parents with travel schedules so demanding that their children rarely see them. Some have parents in the military who are stationed abroad. These teenagers live in a culture preoccupied with terrorism. They all experienced 9/11. They have grown up walking through metal detectors at schools and airports. They tend not to assume safe passage. The cell phone as amulet becomes emblematic of safety.
Julia tells her mother where she is at all times. She checks in after school, when she gets on the train, when she arrives home or at a friend’s house. If going out, she calls “when we get to the place and when I get home.” She says, “It’s really hard to think about not having your cell phone. I couldn’t picture not having it.... I feel like it’s attached. Me and my friends say, ‘I feel naked without it.’” The naked self feels itself in jeopardy. It is fragile and dependent on connection. Connection can reduce anxieties, but as I have said, it creates problems of its own.
WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?
Lisa, seventeen, a junior at the Cranston School, feels disoriented: “I come home from school and go online, and I’m feeling okay, and I talk for two hours on the Web. But then I still have no friends. I’ll never know the people I spoke to. They are ‘chat people.’ Yeah, they could be twelve years old.” Her investment in “chat people” leaves her with the question of what her online hours really add up to. It is a question that preoccupies Hannah, sixteen, another Cranston junior. She knows for sure that online connections help her with anxiety about boys. Many of her friends have boyfriends. She has not really started to date. At Cranston, having a boyfriend means pressure for sexual intimacy. She knows she is not ready but does feel left out.
Five years before, when she was eleven, Hannah made an online friend who called himself Ian. She joined an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel about 1960s rock bands, a particular passion of hers. Ian, who said he was fourteen at the time, was also on the channel. After a few years of getting to know each other in the group, Hannah says that she and Ian figured out how to create a private chat room. She says, “It felt like magic. All of a sudden we were in this room, by ourselves.” Over time, Hannah and Ian got into the habit of talking and playing Scrabble every day, often for hours at a time. Ian said he lived in Liverpool and was about to go off to university. Hannah dreams of meeting him as soon as she goes to college, a year and a half from now, “when it won’t seem strange for me to have friends from all over the world and friends who are older.” Despite the fact that they have only communicated via typed-out messages, Hannah says, “Ian is the person who knows me best.” Hannah doesn’t want to add an audio or video channel to their encounters. As things are, Hannah is able to imagine Ian as she wishes him to be. And he can imagine her as he wishes her to be. The idea that we can be exactly what the other desires is a powerful fantasy. Among other things, it seems to promise that the other will never, ever, have reason to leave. Feeling secure as an object of desire (because the other is able to imagine you as the perfect embodiment of his or her desire) is one of the deep pleasures of Internet life.
Online, Hannah practices the kind of flirting that does not yet come easily to her in the real. The safety of the relationship with Ian allows her to explore what it might be like to have a boyfriend and give herself over to a crush. But Hannah also finds the friendship “a bit scary” because, she says, “the person I love most in the world could simply
not show up
on any given day,” never to be heard from again. Ian boils down to a probably made-up first name and a history of warm conversations.
Hannah is wistful about Ian. “Even if I feel that I know Ian, I still don’t feel that I know him the same way I know someone in real life.” Sometimes she feels in a close friendship, and sometimes she sees it all as a house of cards. With the aspect of someone who has discovered that they don’t like one of Newton’s laws, she says, “I think it’s kind of sad, but in order to have a really genuine relationship, there has to be some point where you’re with your senses, experiencing some output that person’s making with their body, like looking at their face, or hearing their words.” Hannah falls silent. When she speaks again, her voice is low. There is something else. Her time on the IRC channel has cost her. The people on the channel are not nice. “I don’t like it that I’m friends with mean people,” she says. Her online friends “mock and kick and abuse newcomers,” and sometimes they even turn against their own. Hannah doesn’t think she will become the object of this kind of hostility. But this is not entirely comforting. For she has become part of the tribe by behaving like its members. She says, “I do sometimes make crueler jokes on IRC than I would in real life.... That made me start thinking, ‘Do I want to continue being friends with these people?’ I started thinking about how vicious they can be. It’s a little bit like if someone were in a clique at school, who would viciously reject or mock people they didn’t want in their clique, I might say that’s a little unfriendly, and why do you want to be friends with people who are so cruel?”
Hannah does not think that her “nicer” school friends are so different from her online friends. Like Marcia, she attributes their cruelty to the Internet because “it can bring out the worst in people.... Angers get worse.... There are no brakes.” And now, she is spending close to twenty hours a week seeking the approval of people whose behavior she finds reprehensible. And whose behavior she emulates to curry favor. It is all exhausting. “Friendship on the Internet,” says Hannah, “is much more demanding than in real life.” And in the end, with all those demands met, she doesn’t know what she really has.
Hannah thought that online friendships would make her feel more in control of her social life. Her “original assumption,” she says, had been that she could be online when she felt like it but skip out “and not feel bad” when she was busy. This turned out not to be the case. Her online friends get angry if she doesn’t show up in the chat room. And they are high maintenance in other ways. On IRC, they are fast-talking and judgmental. There is pressure to be witty. Hannah says, “I walk around school thinking about what I will talk about with them later.” Beyond this, Hannah has recently joined Facebook, which only increases her preoccupations. Most Cranston students agree that the people who know you best in real life—school friends, for example—will be tolerant of an un-tended Facebook. The harsher judges are more distant acquaintances or people you hope to bring into your circle. These could be more popular students, students from other high schools, or those already in college. The consensus about them: “You know they’re looking at all your stuff.”
Hannah, sensitive to having all these new eyes on her, becomes drawn into what she describes as “an all-consuming effort to keep up appearances.” She says, “On Facebook, things have gotten out of control.... You don’t have to be on a lot, but you can’t be on so little that your profile is totally lame. So, once you are on it, it makes you do enough so that you are not embarrassed.” In this construction, tellingly, it is Facebook that has volition.
Other Cranston students describe similar pressures. For one senior boy, “You have to give to Facebook to get from Facebook.” He continues, “If you don’t use it, people are not going to communicate with you. People are going to see no one’s communicating with you, and that, I think, leads to kids spending hours on Facebook every day trying to buff it out.” Like a sleek, gym-toned body, an appealing online self requires work to achieve. A sophomore girl says, “I get anxious if my last wall post was from a week ago because it looks like you’re a nerd. It really matters. People know it is a way that people are going to judge you.” A senior boy painstakingly explains how to keep “your Facebook in shape.” First, you have to conserve your energy. “It is a waste of time,” he says, “to use Facebook messaging” because these messages are like e-mail, private between the correspondents. “They will do nothing for your image.” The essential is “to spend some time every day writing things on other people’s walls so that they will respond on your wall.” If you do this religiously, you will look popular. If you don’t, he says darkly, “there can be a problem.” Another senior boy describes the anxieties that attend feeding the beast:
I go on sometimes and I’m like, “My last wall post was a week ago.” I’m thinking, “That’s no good, everyone will see this and say, ‘He doesn’t have any friends.’” So I get really nervous about that and I’m thinking, “I have to write on somebody else’s wall so they’ll write back to me so it looks like I have friends again.” That’s my whole mentality on Facebook.