I meet other teenagers, like Brad, who go on self-imposed media “fasts.” Some give up texting, some IM. Because of its centrality to social life, the most decisive step they can think of is to leave Facebook.
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Some, like Brad, are exhausted by its pressure for performance. Some say they find themselves being “cruel”—online life suppresses healthy inhibitions. Others say they lose touch with their “real” friends as they spend hours keeping up contacts with the “friended.” Some, not yet many, rebel against the reality that Facebook owns (in the most concrete terms) the story of their lives. Some believe that the site encourages them to judge themselves and others in superficial ways. They agonize over what photographs to post. They digitally alter their Facebook photographs to look more appealing. But even after so much time, writing profiles and editing photos, the fiction of a Facebook page is that it is put up with a kind of aristocratic nonchalance. Luis says, “It’s like a girl wearing too much makeup, trying too hard. It’s supposed to look like you didn’t care. But no one believes this myth of ‘Oh, I just threw some stuff up on my page.... I’m very cool. I have so much else to do.’ You see that they are on their Facebook page all day. Who are they kidding?” His tone turns wistful: “It must have been nice when you could just discover a person by talking to them.” For all of these reasons, dropping out comes as something of a relief.
The terms of these refusals—to find oneself and others more directly and to live a less-mediated life, to move away from performances and toward something that feels more real—suggest the refusals that brought Henry David Thoreau to Walden Pond nearly two centuries before.
WALDEN 2.0
In his essay about his two years of retreat, Thoreau writes, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary.”
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Thoreau’s quest inspires us to ask of our life with technology: Do we live deliberately? Do we turn away from life that is not life? Do we refuse resignation?
Some believe that the new connectivity culture provides a digital Walden. A fifteen-year-old girl describes her phone as her refuge. “My cell phone,” she says, “is my only individual zone, just for me.” Technology writer Kevin Kelly, the first editor of
Wired
, says that he finds refreshment on the Web. He is replenished in its cool shade: “At times I’ve entered the web just to get lost. In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown. Despite the purposeful design of its human creators, the web is a wilderness. Its boundaries are unknown, unknowable, its mysteries uncountable. The bramble of intertwined ideas, links, documents, and images create an otherness as thick as a jungle. The web smells like life.”
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But not everyone is as refreshed as Kelly. Brad talks about the “throwaway friendships” of online life. Hannah wonders what she really has to show for the time she has spent hanging out with a small, sarcastic in-crowd and with a best friend who she fears will simply not show up again. It is hard to accept that online friends are not part of your life; yet, they can make themselves disappear just as you can make them vanish. Anxiety about Internet friendships makes people cherish the other kind. The possibility of constant connection makes people value a bit of space. Pattie, fourteen, no longer carries her cell phone. “It feels good,” she says, “to have people
not
reach you.”
That bit of space could leave room for a child to be a child a bit longer. One of the privileges of childhood is that some of the world is mediated by adults. Hillary, sixteen, is taking a long break from her cell phone. She doesn’t want to be on call, and so she leaves it at home. “I don’t like the feeling of being reachable all the time . . . of knowing about everything in real time.” For a child—and for this purpose, adolescents are still children—one cost of constant connectivity is that adults lose the ability to act as a buffer against the world. Only a few months before, Hillary was at a party to celebrate the release of a new volume in the Harry Potter series when her father suffered a seizure. She didn’t learn about it until she was at home and with family. She was glad for this. Without a cell phone, the bad news waited until there was an adult there to support her, to put it in context. She didn’t want to hear it alone, holding a phone.
Hillary is fond of movies but drawn toward “an Amish life minus certain exceptions [these would be the movies] ... but I wouldn’t mind if the Internet went away.” She asks, “What could people be doing if they weren’t on the Internet?” She answers her own question: “There’s piano; there’s drawing; there’s all these things people could be creating.” Hillary talks about how hard it is to keep up “all the different sites you have to keep up,” and above all, how time-consuming it is to feed Facebook. These tiring performances leave little space for creativity and reflection: “It really is distracting.” There is not much room for what Thoreau meant by a life lived deliberately.
There is nothing more deliberate than the painstaking work of constructing a profile or having a conversation on instant messenger in which one composes and recomposes one’s thoughts. And yet, most of the time on the Net, one floats and experiments, follows links, and sends out random feelers. One flips through the photo albums of friends—and then the albums of their friends. One comments on the postings of people one hardly knows. Thoreau complained that people are too quick to share an opinion. Online, social networks instruct us to share whenever there’s “something on our mind,” no matter how ignorant or ill considered, and then help us broadcast it to the widest possible audience. Every day each of us is bombarded by other people’s random thoughts. We start to see such effusions as natural. So, although identity construction on the Net begins in a considered way, with the construction of a profile or an avatar, people can end up feeling that the only deliberate act is the decision to hand oneself over to the Net. After that, one is swept along.
For those so connected, there may be doubts (about life as performance, about losing the nuance of the face-to-face), but there is the pleasure of continual company. For those not connected, there can be an eerie loneliness, even on the streets of one’s hometown. Kara, in her fifties, feels that life in her hometown of Portland, Maine, has emptied out: “Sometimes I walk down the street, and I’m the only person not plugged in. It’s like I’m looking for another person who is not plugged in.” With nostalgia—which can come with youth or age—for the nod that marks a meeting in shared streets and weather, she adds a bit wistfully, “No one is where they are. They’re talking to someone miles away. I miss them. But they are missing out.” Nostalgia ensures that certain things stay before us: the things we miss.
There are no simple answers as to whether the Net is a place to be deliberate, to commit to life, and live without resignation. But these are good terms with which to start a conversation. That conversation would have us ask if these are the values by which we want to judge our lives. If they are, and if we are living in a technological culture that does not support them, how can that culture be rebuilt to specifications that respect what we treasure—our sacred spaces. Could we, for example, build a Net that reweights privacy concerns, acknowledging that these, as much as information, are central to democratic life?
The phrase “sacred spaces” became important to me in the 1980s when I studied a cohort of scientists, engineers, and designers newly immersed in simulation. Members of each group held certain aspects of their professional life to be inviolate.
9
These were places they wanted to hold apart from simulation because, in that space, they felt most fully themselves in their discipline. For architects, it was hand drawings. This was where design implicated the body of the architect. This was where architects were engineers, certainly, but they were also artists. This was where the trace of the hand personalized a building. And this was where architects, so often part of large teams, experienced themselves as authors. The most enthusiastic proponents of computer-assisted design defended hand drawing. When their students began to lose the skill, these professors sent them off to drawing class. It was not about rejecting the computer but about making sure that designers came to it with their own values. A sacred space is not a place to hide out. It is a place where we recognize ourselves and our commitments.
When Thoreau considered “where I live and what I live for,” he tied together location and values. Where we live doesn’t just change how we live; it informs who we become. Most recently, technology promises us lives on the screen. What values, Thoreau would ask, follow from this new location? Immersed in simulation, where do we live, and what do we live for?
CONCLUSION
Necessary conversations
D
uring my earliest days at MIT, I met the idea (at that time altogether novel to me) that part of my job would be to think of ways to keep technology busy. In the fall of 1978, Michael Dertouzos, director of the Laboratory for Computer Science, held a two-day retreat at MIT’s Endicott House on the future of personal computers, at the time widely called “home computers.” It was clear that “everyday people,” as Dertouzos put it, would soon be able to have their own computers. The first of these—the first that could be bought and didn’t have to be built—were just coming on the market. But what could people do with them? There was technological potential, but it needed to be put to work. Some of the most brilliant computer scientists in the world—such pioneers of information processing and artificial intelligence as Robert Fano, J. C. R. Lickleider, Marvin Minsky, and Seymour Papert—were asked to brainstorm on the question. My notes from this meeting show suggestions on tax preparation and teaching children to program. No one thought that anyone except academics would really want to write on computers. Several people suggested a calendar; others thought that was a dumb idea. There would be games.
Now we know that once computers connected us to each other, once we became tethered to the network, we really didn’t need to keep computers busy.
They keep us busy.
It is as though we have become their killer app. As a friend of mine put it in a moment of pique, “We don’t do our e-mail; our e-mail does us.” We talk about “spending” hours on e-mail, but we, too, are being spent. Niels Bohr suggests that the opposite of a “deep truth” is a truth no less profound.
1
As we contemplate online life, it helps to keep this in mind.
Online, we easily find “company” but are exhausted by the pressures of performance. We enjoy continual connection but rarely have each other’s full attention. We can have instant audiences but flatten out what we say to each other in new reductive genres of abbreviation. We like it that the Web “knows” us, but this is only possible because we compromise our privacy, leaving electronic bread crumbs that can be easily exploited, both politically and commercially. We have many new encounters but may come to experience them as tentative, to be put “on hold” if better ones come along. Indeed, new encounters need not be better to get our attention. We are wired to respond positively to their simply being new. We can work from home, but our work bleeds into our private lives until we can barely discern the boundaries between them. We like being able to reach each other almost instantaneously but have to hide our phones to force ourselves to take a quiet moment.
Overwhelmed by the pace that technology makes possible, we think about how new, more efficient technologies might help dig us out. But new devices encourage ever-greater volume and velocity. In this escalation of demands, one of the things that comes to feel safe is using technology to connect to people at a distance, or more precisely, to a lot of people from a distance. But even a lot of people from a distance can turn out to be not enough people at all. We brag about how many we have “friended” on Facebook, yet Americans say they have fewer friends than before.
2
When asked in whom they can confide and to whom they turn in an emergency, more and more say that their only resource is their family.
The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy. We text each other at family dinners, while we jog, while we drive, as we push our children on swings in the park. We don’t want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in “real time.” When we misplace our mobile devices, we become anxious—impossible really. We have heard teenagers insist that even when their cell phones are not on their person, they can feel them vibrate. “I know when I’m being called,” says a sixteen-year-old. “I just do.” Sentiments of dependency echo across generations. “I never am without my cell phone,” says a fifty-two-year-old father. “It is my protection.”
In the evening, when sensibilities such as these come together, they are likely to form what have been called “postfamilial families.”
3
Their members are alone together, each in their own rooms, each on a networked computer or mobile device. We go online because we are busy but end up spending more time with technology and less with each other. We defend connectivity as a way to be close, even as we effectively hide from each other. At the limit, we will settle for the inanimate, if that’s what it takes.