On most days, Pete logs onto Second Life before leaving for work. Pete and Jade talk (by typing) and then erotically engage their avatars, something that Second Life software makes possible with special animations.
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Boundaries between life and game are not easy to maintain. Online, Pete and Jade talk about sex and Second Life gossip, but they also talk about money, the recession, work, and matters of health. Pete is on cholesterol-lowering medication that is only partially successful. Pete says that it is hard to talk to his “real” wife Alison about his anxieties; she gets “too worried that I might die and leave her alone.” But he can talk to Jade. Pete says, “Second Life gives me a better relationship than I have in real life. This is where I feel most myself. Jade accepts who I am. My relationship with Jade makes it possible for me to stay in my marriage, with my family.” The ironies are apparent: an avatar who has never seen or spoken to him in person and to whom he appears in a body nothing like his own seems, to him, most accepting of his truest self.
Pete enjoys this Sunday in the playground; he is with his children and with Jade. He says, “My children seem content.... I feel like I’m with them.... I’m here for them but in the background.” I glance around the playground. Many adults are dividing their attention between children and mobile devices. Are they scrolling through e-mails and texts from family, friends, and colleagues? Are they looking at photographs? Are they in parallel worlds with virtual lovers?
When people make the point that we have always found ways to escape from ourselves, that neither the desire nor the possibility is new with the Internet, I always tell them they are right. Pete’s online life bears a family resemblance to how some people use more traditional extramarital affairs. It also resembles how people can play at being “other” on business trips and vacations. When Pete pushes a swing with one hand and types notes to Jade with the other, something is familiar: a man finding that a relationship outside his marriage gives him something he wants. But something is unfamiliar: the simultaneity of lives, the interleaving of romance with a shout-out to a six-year-old. Pete says that his online marriage is an essential part of his “life mix.” I ask him about this expression. I have never heard it before. Pete explains that the life mix is the mash-up of what you have on- and offline. Now, we ask not of our satisfactions in life but in our life mix. We have moved from multitasking to multi-lifing.
You need mobile communication to get to the notion of the life mix. Until recently, one had to sit in front of a computer screen to enter virtual space. This meant that the passage through the looking glass was deliberate and bounded by the time you could spend in front of a computer. Now, with a mobile device as portal, one moves into the virtual with fluidity and on the go. This makes it easier to use our lives as avatars to manage the tensions of everyday existence. We use social networking to be “ourselves,” but our online performances take on lives of their own. Our online selves develop distinct personalities. Sometimes we see them as our “better selves.” As we invest in them, we want to take credit for them. Recently—although, admittedly, at MIT I live in the land of the technosophisticated—I have been given business cards that include people’s real-life names, their Facebook handles, and the name of their avatar on Second Life.
In talking about sociable robots, I described an arc that went from seeing simulation as better than nothing to simply better, as offering companions that could meet one’s exact emotional requirements. Something similar is happening online. We may begin by thinking that e-mails, texts, and Facebook messaging are thin gruel but useful if the alternative is sparse communication with the people we care about. Then, we become accustomed to their special pleasures—we can have connection when and where we want or need it, and we can easily make it go away. In only a few more steps, you have people describing life on Facebook as better than anything they have ever known. They use the site to share their thoughts, their music, and their photos. They expand their reach in a continually growing community of acquaintance. No matter how esoteric their interests, they are surrounded by enthusiasts, potentially drawn from all over the world. No matter how parochial the culture around them, they are cosmopolitan. In this spirit, when Pete talks about Second Life, he extols its international flavor and his “in-world” educational opportunities. He makes it clear that he spends time “in physical life” with friends and family. But he says that Second Life “is my preferred way of being with people.”
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In addition to the time he spends on Second Life, Pete has an avatar on World of Warcraft, and he is a regular on the social-networking sites Facebook, LinkedIn, and Plaxo. Every day he checks one professional and three personal e-mail accounts. I once described this kind of movement among identities with the metaphor of “cycling through.”
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But now, with mobile technology, cycling through has accelerated into the mash-up of a life mix. Rapid cycling stabilizes into a sense of continual copresence. Even a simple cell phone brings us into the world of continual partial attention.
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Not that many years ago, one of my graduate students talked to me about the first time he found himself walking across the MIT campus with a friend who took an incoming call on his mobile phone. My student was irritated, almost incredulous. “He put me on ‘pause.’ Am I supposed to remember where we were and pick up the conversation after he is done with his call?” At the time, his friend’s behavior seemed rude and confusing. Only a few years later, it registers as banal. Mobile technology has made each of us “pauseable.” Our face-to-face conversations are routinely interrupted by incoming calls and text messages. In the world of paper mail, it was unacceptable for a colleague to read his or her correspondence during a meeting. In the new etiquette, turning away from those in front of you to answer a mobile phone or respond to a text has become close to the norm. When someone holds a phone, it can be hard to know if you have that person’s attention. A parent, partner, or child glances down and is lost to another place, often without realizing that they have taken leave. In restaurants, customers are asked to turn their phones to vibrate. But many don’t need sound or vibration to know that something has happened on their phones. “When there is an event on my phone, the screen changes,” says a twenty-six-year-old lawyer. “There is a brightening of the screen. Even if my phone is in my purse . . . I see it, I sense it.... I always know what is happening on my phone.”
People are skilled at creating rituals for demarcating the boundaries between the world of work and the world of family, play, and relaxation. There are special times (the Sabbath), special meals (the family dinner), special clothes (the “armor” for a day’s labor comes off at home, whether it is the businessman’s suit or the laborer’s overalls), and special places (the dining room, the parlor, the kitchen, and the bedroom). Now demarcations blur as technology accompanies us everywhere, all the time. We are too quick to celebrate the continual presence of a technology that knows no respect for traditional and helpful lines in the sand.
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Sal, sixty-two, a widower, describes one erased line as a “Rip van Winkle experience.” When his wife became ill five years before, he dropped out of one world. Now, a year after her death, he wakes up in another. Recently, Sal began to entertain at his home again. At his first small dinner party, he tells me, “I invited a woman, about fifty, who works in Washington. In the middle of a conversation about the Middle East, she takes out her BlackBerry. She wasn’t speaking on it. I wondered if she was checking her e-mail. I thought she was being rude, so I asked her what she was doing. She said that she was blogging the conversation. She was
blogging
the conversation.” Several months after the event, Sal remains incredulous. He thinks of an evening with friends as private, as if surrounded by an invisible wall. His guest, living the life mix, sees her evening as an occasion to appear on a larger virtual stage.
THE NEW STATE OF THE SELF: MULTITASKING AND THE ALCHEMY OF TIME
In the 1980s, the children I interviewed about their lives with technology often did their homework with television and music in the background and a handheld video game for distraction. Algebra and Super Mario were part of the same package. Today, such recollections sound almost pastoral. A child doing homework is usually—among other things—attending to Facebook, shopping, music, online games, texts, videos, calls, and instant messages. Absent only is e-mail, considered by most people under twenty-five a technology of the past, or perhaps required to apply to college or to submit a job application.
Subtly, over time, multitasking, once seen as something of a blight, was recast as a virtue. And over time, the conversation about its virtues became extravagant, with young people close to lionized for their ability to do many things at once. Experts went so far as to declare multitasking not just a skill but
the
crucial skill for successful work and learning in digital culture. There was even concern that old-fashioned teachers who could only do one thing at a time would hamper student learning.
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Now we must wonder at how easily we were smitten. When psychologists study multitasking, they do not find a story of new efficiencies. Rather, multitaskers don’t perform as well on any of the tasks they are attempting.
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But multitasking feels good because the body rewards it with neurochemicals that induce a multitasking “high.” The high deceives multitaskers into thinking they are being especially productive. In search of the high, they want to do even more. In the years ahead, there will be a lot to sort out. We fell in love with what technology made easy. Our bodies colluded.
These days, even as some educators try to integrate smartphones into classrooms, others experiment with media fasts to get students down to business. At my university, professors are divided about whether they should meddle at all. Our students, some say, are grown-ups. It is not for us to dictate how they take notes or to get involved if they let their attention wander from class-related materials. But when I stand in back of our Wi-Fi enabled lecture halls, students are on Facebook and YouTube, and they are shopping, mostly for music. I want to engage my students in conversation. I don’t think they should use class time for any other purpose. One year, I raised the topic for general discussion and suggested using notebooks (the paper kind) for note taking. Some of my students claimed to be relieved. “Now I won’t be tempted by Facebook messages,” said one sophomore. Others were annoyed, almost surly. They were not in a position to defend their right to shop and download music in class, so they insisted that they liked taking notes on their computers. I was forcing them to take notes by hand and then type them into computer documents later. While they were complaining about this two-step process, I was secretly thinking what a good learning strategy this might be. I maintained my resolve, but the following year, I bowed to common practice and allowed students to do what they wished. But I notice, along with several of my colleagues, that the students whose laptops are open in class do not do as well as the others.
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When media are always there, waiting to be wanted, people lose a sense of choosing to communicate. Those who use BlackBerry smartphones talk about the fascination of watching their lives “scroll by.” They watch their lives as though watching a movie. One says, “I glance at my watch to sense the time; I glance at my BlackBerry to get a sense of my life.”
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Adults admit that interrupting their work for e-mail and messages is distracting but say they would never give it up. When I ask teenagers specifically about being interrupted during homework time, for example, by Facebook messages or new texts, many seem not to understand the question. They say things like, “That’s just how it is. That’s just my life.” When the BlackBerry movie of one’s life becomes one’s life, there is a problem: the BlackBerry version is the unedited version of one’s life. It contains more than one has time to live. Although we can’t keep up with it, we feel responsible for it. It is, after all, our life. We strive to be a self that can keep up with its e-mail.
Our networked devices encourage a new notion of time because they promise that one can layer more activities onto it. Because you can text while doing something else, texting does not seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome; it is magical. We have managed to squeeze in that extra little bit, but the fastest living among us encourage us to read books with titles such as
In Praise of Slowness.
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And we have found ways of spending more time with friends and family in which we hardly give them any attention at all.
We are overwhelmed across the generations. Teenagers complain that parents don’t look up from their phones at dinner and that they bring their phones to school sporting events. Hannah, sixteen, is a solemn, quiet high school junior. She tells me that for years she has tried to get her mother’s attention when her mother comes to fetch her after school or after dance lessons. Hannah says, “The car will start; she’ll be driving still looking down, looking at her messages, but still no hello.” We will hear others tell similar stories.
Parents say they are ashamed of such behavior but quickly get around to explaining, if not justifying, it. They say they are more stressed than ever as they try to keep up with e-mail and messages. They always feel behind. They cannot take a vacation without bringing the office with them; their office is on their cell phone.
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They complain that their employers require them to be continually online but then admit that their devotion to their communications devices exceeds all professional expectations.