For Foucault, the task of the modern state is to reduce its need for actual surveillance by creating a citizenry that will watch itself. A disciplined citizen minds the rules. Foucault wrote about Jeremy Bentham’s design for a panopticon because it captured how such a citizenry is shaped.
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In the panopticon, a wheel-like structure with an observer at its hub, one develops the sense of always being watched, whether or not the observer is actually present. If the structure is a prison, inmates know that a guard can potentially always see them. In the end, the architecture encourages self-surveillance.
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The panopticon serves as a metaphor for how, in the modern state, every citizen becomes his or her own policeman. Force becomes unnecessary because the state creates its own obedient citizenry. Always available for scrutiny, all turn their eyes on themselves. By analogy, said my Webby conversation partner, on the Internet, someone might always be watching, so it doesn’t matter if, from time to time, someone actually is. As long as you are not doing anything wrong, you are safe. Foucault’s critical take on disciplinary society had, in the hands of this technology guru, become a justification for the U.S. government to use the Internet to spy on its citizens. All around us at the cocktail party, there were nods of assent. We have seen that variants of this way of thinking, very common in the technology community, are gaining popularity among high school and college students.
If you relinquish your privacy on MySpace or Facebook about everything from your musical preferences to your sexual hang-ups, you are less likely to be troubled by an anonymous government agency knowing whom you call or what websites you frequent. Some are even gratified by a certain public exposure; it feels like validation, not violation. Being seen means that they are not insignificant or alone. For all the talk of a generation empowered by the Net, any discussion of online privacy generates claims of resignation and impotence. When I talk to teenagers about the certainty that their privacy will be invaded, I think of my very different experience growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s.
As the McCarthy era swirled about them, my grandparents were frightened. From Eastern European backgrounds, they saw the McCarthy hearings not as a defense of patriotism but as an attack on people’s rights. Joseph McCarthy was spying on Americans, and having the government spy on its citizens was familiar from the old world. There, you assumed that the government read your mail, which never led to good. In America, things were different. I lived with my grandparents as a young child in a large apartment building. Every morning, my grandmother took me downstairs to the mailboxes. Looking at the gleaming brass doors, on which, she noted, “people were not afraid to have their names listed, for all to see,” my grandmother would tell me, as if it had never come up before, “In America, no one can look at your mail. It’s a federal offense. That’s the beauty of this country.” From the earliest age, my civics lessons at the mailbox linked privacy and civil liberties. I think of how different things are today for children who learn to live with the idea that their e-mail and messages are share-able and unprotected. And I think of the Internet guru at the Webby awards who, citing Foucault with no apparent irony, accepted the idea that the Internet has fulfilled the dream of the panopticon and summed up his political position about the Net as follows: “The way to deal is to just be good.”
But sometimes a citizenry should not simply “be good.” You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent. There needs to be technical space (a sacrosanct mailbox) and mental space. The two are intertwined. We make our technologies, and they, in turn, make and shape us. My grandmother made me an American citizen, a civil libertarian, a defender of individual rights in an apartment lobby in Brooklyn. I am not sure where to take my eighteen-year-old daughter, who still thinks that Loopt (the application that uses the GPS capability of the iPhone to show her where her friends are) seems “creepy” but notes that it would be hard to keep it off her phone if all her friends had it. “They would think I had something to hide.”
In democracy, perhaps we all need to begin with the assumption that everyone has something to hide, a zone of private action and reflection, one that must be protected no matter what our techno-enthusiasms. I am haunted by the sixteen-year-old boy who told me that when he needs to make a private call, he uses a pay phone that takes coins and complains how hard it is to find one in Boston. And I am haunted by the girl who summed up her reaction to losing online privacy by asking, “Who would care about me and my little life?”
I learned to be a citizen at the Brooklyn mailboxes. To me, opening up a conversation about technology, privacy, and civil society is not romantically nostalgic, not Luddite in the least. It seems like part of democracy defining its sacred spaces.
CHAPTER 14
The nostalgia of the young
C
liff, a Silver Academy sophomore, talks about whether it will ever be possible to get back to what came “before texting.” Cliff says that he gets so caught up in the back-and-forth of texting that he ends up wasting time in what he thinks are superficial communications “just to get back.” I ask him about when, in his view, there might be less pressure for an immediate response. Cliff thinks of two: “Your class has a test. Or you lost your signal.” Conspicuously absent—you are doing something else, thinking something else, with someone else.
We have seen young people walk the halls of their schools composing messages to online acquaintances they will never meet. We have seen them feeling more alive when connected, then disoriented and alone when they leave their screens. Some live more than half their waking hours in virtual places. But they also talk wistfully about letters, face-to-face meetings, and the privacy of pay phones. Tethered selves, they try to conjure a future different from the one they see coming by building on a past they never knew. In it, they have time alone, with nature, with each other, and with their families.
Texting is too seductive. It makes a promise that generates its own demand.
1
The promise: the person you text will receive the message within seconds, and whether or not he or she is “free,” the recipient will be able to see your text. The demand: when you receive a text, you will attend to it (during class, this might mean a glance down at a silenced phone) and respond as soon as possible. Cliff says that in his circle of friends, that means, “ten minutes, maximum.”
I will tell you how it is at this school. If something comes in on our phone and it’s a text, you feel you have to respond. They obviously know you got it. With IM, you can claim you weren’t at the computer or you lost your Internet connection and all that. But if it’s a text, there’s no way you didn’t get it. Few people look down at their phone and then walk away from it. Few people do that. It really doesn’t happen.... Texting is pressure. I don’t always feel like communicating. Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?
Indeed, who says? Listening to what young people miss may teach us what they need. They need attention.
ATTENTION
Teenagers know that when they communicate by instant message, they compete with many other windows on a computer screen. They know how little attention they are getting because they know how little they give to the instant messages they receive. One sophomore girl at Branscomb High School compares instant messaging to being on “cruise control” or “automatic pilot.” Your attention is elsewhere. A Branscomb senior says, “Even if I give my full attention to the person I am IMing . . . they are not giving full attention to me.” The first thing he does when he makes a call is to gauge whether the person on the other end “is there just for me.” This is one advantage of a call. When you text or instant-message, you have no way to tell how much else is going on for the person writing you. He or she could also be on the phone, doing homework, watching TV, or in the midst of other online conversations.
Longed for here is the pleasure of full attention, coveted and rare. These teenagers grew up with parents who talked on their cell phones and scrolled through messages as they walked to the playground. Parents texted with one hand and pushed swings with the other. They glanced up at the jungle gym as they made calls. Teenagers describe childhoods with parents who were on their mobile devices while driving them to school or as the family watched Disney videos. A college freshman jokes that her father read her the Harry Potter novels, periodically interrupted by his BlackBerry. BlackBerries and laptops came on family vacations. Weekends in the country were cut short if there was no Internet service in the hotel. Lon, eighteen, says when that happened, his father “called it a day.” He packed up the family and went home, back to a world of connections.
From the youngest ages, these teenagers have associated technology with shared attention. Phones, before they become an essential element in a child’s own life, were the competition, one that children didn’t necessarily feel they could best. And things are not so different in the teenage years. Nick, seventeen, says, “My parents text while we eat. I’m used to it. My dad says it is better than his having to be at the office. I say, ‘Well, maybe it could just be a short meal.’ But my mom, she wants long meals. To get a long meal with a lot of courses, she has to allow the BlackBerry.” Things seem at a stalemate.
Children have always competed for their parents’ attention, but this generation has experienced something new. Previously, children had to deal with parents being off with work, friends, or each other. Today, children contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere. Hannah’s description of how her mother doesn’t look up from her BlackBerry to say hello when she picks her up at school highlights a painful contrast between the woman who goes to the trouble to fetch her daughter and the woman who cannot look up from her screen. Lon says he liked it better when his father had a desktop computer. It meant that he worked from a specific place. Now his father sits next to him on the couch watching a football game but is on his BlackBerry as well. Because they are physically close, his father’s turn to the BlackBerry seems particularly excluding.
Miguel, a Hadley senior, says that having his father scroll through his BlackBerry messages during television sports is “stressful” but adds “not the kind that really kills you. More the kind that always bothers you.” Miguel says it is hard for him to ask his father to put the BlackBerry away because he himself texts when he is with his father in the car. “He has a son who texts, so why shouldn’t he?” But when parents see their children checking their mobile devices and thus feel permission to use their own, the adults are discounting a crucial asymmetry. The multitasking teenagers are just that, teenagers. They want and need adult attention. They are willing to admit that they are often relieved when a parent asks them to put away the phone and sit down to talk. But for parents to make this request—and this no longer goes without saying—they have to put down their phones as well. Sometimes it is children (often in alliance with their mothers) who find a way to insist that dinner time be a time for talking—time away from the smartphone. But habits of shared attention die hard.
One high school senior recalls a time when his father used to sit next to him on the couch, reading. “He read for pleasure and didn’t mind being interrupted.” But when his father, a doctor, switched from books to his BlackBerry, things became less clear: “He could be playing a game or looking at a patient record, and you would never know.... He is in that same BlackBerry zone.” It takes work to bring his father out of that zone. When he emerges, he needs time to refocus. “You might ask him a question and he’ll say, ‘Yeah, one second.’ And then he’ll finish typing his e-mail or whatever, he’ll log off whatever, and he’ll say, ‘Yeah, I’m sorry, what did you say?’”
It is commonplace to hear children, from the age of eight through the teen years, describe the frustration of trying to get the attention of their multitasking parents. Now, these same children are insecure about having each other’s attention. At night, as they sit at computer screens, any messages sent or received share “mind space” with shopping, uploading photos, updating Facebook, watching videos, playing games, and doing homework. One high school senior describes evening “conversation” at his machine: “When I’m IMing, I can be talking to three different people at the same time and listening to music and also looking at a website.” During the day, prime time for phone texting, communications happen as teenagers are on their way from one thing to another. Teenagers talk about what they are losing when they text: how someone stands, the tone of their voice, the expression on their face, “the things your eyes and ears tell you,” as one eighteen-year-old puts it.
When I first encountered texting, I thought it too telegraphic to be much more than a way to check in. You could use it to confirm an appointment, settle on a restaurant, or say you were home safely. I was wrong. Texting has evolved into a space for confessions, breakups, and declarations of love. There is something to celebrate here: a new, exuberant space for friendship, a way to blow a virtual kiss. But there is a price. All matters—some delicate, some not—are crammed into a medium that quickly communicates a state but is not well suited for opening a dialogue about complexity of feeling. Texting—interrupted by bad reception, incoming calls, and other text messages (not to mention the fact that it all goes on in the presence other people)—can compromise the intimacy it promises. There is a difference, says an eighteen-year-old boy, “between someone laughing and someone
writing
that they’re laughing.” He says, “My friends are so used to giving their phones all the attention . . . they forget that people are still there to give attention to.”