Teenagers, when pressed for time (a homework assignment is due), may try to escape the demands of the always-on culture. Some will use their parents’ accounts so that their friends won’t know that they are online. Adults hide out as well. On weekends, mobile devices are left at the office or in locked desk drawers. When employers demand connection, people practice evasive maneuvers. They go on adventure vacations and pursue extreme sports. As I write this, it is still possible to take long plane rides with no cell phone or Internet access. But even this is changing. Wi-Fi has made it to the skies.
In a tethered world, too much is possible, yet few can resist measuring success against a metric of what they could accomplish if they were always available. Diane, thirty-six, a curator at a large Midwestern museum, cannot keep up with the pace set by her technology.
I can hardly remember when there was such a thing as a weekend, or when I had a Filofax and I thought about whose name I would add to my address book. My e-mail program lets me click on the name of the person who wrote me and poof, they are in my address book. Now everyone who writes me gets put in my address book; everybody is a potential contact, a buyer, donor, and fund-raiser. What used to be an address book is more like a database.
I suppose I do my job better, but my job is my whole life. Or my whole life is my job. When I move from calendar, to address book, to e-mail, to text messages, I feel like a master of the universe; everything is so efficient. I am a maximizing machine. I am on my BlackBerry until two in the morning. I don’t sleep well, but I still can’t keep up with what is sent to me.
Now for work, I’m expected to have a Twitter feed and a Facebook presence about the museum. And do a blog on museum happenings. That means me in all these places. I have a voice condition. I keep losing my voice. It’s not from talking too much. All I do is type, but it has hit me at my voice. The doctor says it’s a nervous thing.
Diane, in the company of programs, feels herself “a master of the universe.” Yet, she is only powerful enough to see herself as a “maximizing machine” that responds to what the network throws at her. She and her husband have decided they should take a vacation. She plans to tell her colleagues that she is going to be “off the grid” for two weeks, but Diane keeps putting off her announcement. She doesn’t know how it will be taken. The norm in the museum is that it is fine to take time off for vacations but not to go offline during them. So, a vacation usually means working from someplace picturesque. Indeed, advertisements for wireless networks routinely feature a handsome man or beautiful woman sitting on a beach. Tethered, we are not to deny the body and its pleasures but to put our bodies somewhere beautiful while we work. Once, mobile devices needed to be shown in such advertisements. Now, they are often implied. We know that the successful are always connected. On vacation, one vacates a place, not a set of responsibilities. In a world of constant communication, Diane’s symptom seems fitting: she has become a machine for communicating, but she has no voice left for herself.
As Diane plans her “offline vacation,” she admits that she really wants to go to Paris, “but I would have no excuse not to be online in Paris. Helping to build houses in the Amazon, well, who would know if they have Wi-Fi? My new nonnegotiable for a vacation: I have to be able to at least pretend that there is no reason to bring my computer.” But after her vacation in remote Brazil finally takes place, she tells me, “Everybody had their BlackBerries with them. Sitting there in the tent. BlackBerries on. It was as though there was some giant satellite parked in the sky.”
Diane says she receives about five hundred e-mails, several hundred texts, and around forty calls a day. She notes that many business messages come in multiples. People send her a text and an e-mail, then place a call and leave a message on her voicemail. “Client anxiety,” she explains. “They feel better if they communicate.” In her world, Diane is accustomed to receiving a hasty message to which she is expected to give a rapid response. She worries that she does not have the time to take her time on the things that matter. And it is hard to maintain a sense of what matters in the din of constant communication.
The self shaped in a world of rapid response measures success by calls made, e-mails answered, texts replied to, contacts reached. This self is calibrated on the basis of what technology proposes, by what it makes easy. But in the technology-induced pressure for volume and velocity, we confront a paradox. We insist that our world is increasingly complex, yet we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think uninterrupted. As we communicate in ways that ask for almost instantaneous responses, we don’t allow sufficient space to consider complicated problems.
Trey, a forty-six-year-old lawyer with a large Boston firm, raises this issue explicitly. On e-mail, he says, “I answer questions I can answer right away. And people want me to answer them right away. But it’s not only the speed.... The questions have changed to ones that I
can
answer right away.” Trey describes legal matters that call for time and nuance and says that “people don’t have patience for these now. They send an e-mail, and they expect something back fast. They are willing to forgo the nuance; really, the client wants to hear something now, and so I give the answers that can be sent back by return e-mail . . . or maybe answers that will take me a day, max. . . . I feel pressured to think in terms of bright lines.” He corrects himself. “It’s not the technology that does this, of course, but the technology sets expectations about speed.” We are back to a conversation about affordances and vulnerabilities. The technology primes us for speed, and overwhelmed, we are happy to have it help us speed up. Trey reminds me that “we speak in terms of ‘shooting off’ an e-mail. Nobody ‘shoots something off’ because they want things to proceed apace.”
Trey, like Diane, points out that clients frequently send him a text, an e-mail, and a voicemail. “They are saying, ‘Feed me.’ They feel they have the right.” He sums up his experience of the past decade. Electronic communication has been liberating, but in the end, “it has put me on a speed-up, on a treadmill, but that isn’t the same as being productive.”
I talk with a group of lawyers who all insist that their work would be impossible without their “cells”—that nearly universal shorthand for the smartphones of today that have pretty much the functionality of desktop computers and more. The lawyers insist that they are more productive and that their mobile devices “liberate” them to work from home and to travel with their families. The women, in particular, stress that the networked life makes it possible for them to keep their jobs and spend time with their children. Yet, they also say that their mobile devices eat away at their time to think. One says, “I don’t have enough time alone with my mind.” Others say, “I have to struggle to make time to think.” “I artificially make time to think.” “I block out time to think.” These formulations all depend on an “I” imagined as separate from the technology, a self that is able to put the technology aside so that it can function independently of its demands. This formulation contrasts with a growing reality of lives lived in the continuous presence of screens. This reality has us, like the MIT cyborgs, learning to see ourselves as one with our devices. To make more time to think would mean turning off our phones. But this is not a simple proposition since our devices are ever more closely coupled to our sense of our bodies and minds.
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They provide a social and psychological GPS, a navigation system for tethered selves.
As for Diane, she tries to keep up by communicating during what used to be “downtime”—the time when she might have daydreamed during a cab ride or while waiting in line or walking to work. This may be time that we need (physiologically and emotionally) to maintain our ability to focus.
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But Diane does not permit it to herself. And, of course, she uses our new kind of time: the time of attention sharing.
Diane shies away from the telephone because its real-time demands make too much of a claim on her attention. But like the face-to-face interactions for which it substitutes, the telephone can deliver in ways that texts and e-mails cannot. All parties are present. If there are questions, they can be answered. People can express mixed feelings. In contrast, e-mail tends to go back and forth without resolution. Misunderstandings are frequent. Feelings get hurt. And the greater the misunderstanding, the greater the number of e-mails, far more than necessary. We come to experience the column of unopened messages in our inboxes as a burden. Then, we project our feelings and worry that our messages are a burden to others.
We have reason to worry. One of my friends posted on Facebook, “The problem with handling your e-mail backlog is that when you answer mail, people answer back! So for each 10 you handle, you get 5 more! Heading down towards my goal of 300 left tonight, and 100 tomorrow.” This is becoming a common sentiment. Yet it is sad to hear ourselves refer to letters from friends as “to be handled” or “gotten rid of,” the language we use when talking about garbage. But this is the language in use.
An e-mail or text seems to have been always on its way to the trash. These days, as a continuous stream of texts becomes a way of life, we may say less to each other because we imagine that what we say is almost already a throwaway. Texts, by nature telegraphic, can certainly be emotional, insightful, and sexy. They can lift us up. They can make us feel understood, desired, and supported. But they are not a place to deeply understand a problem or to explain a complicated situation. They are momentum. They fill a moment.
FEARFUL SYMMETRIES
When I speak of a new state of the self, itself, I use the word “itself” with purpose. It captures, although with some hyperbole, my concern that the connected life encourages us to treat those we meet online in something of the same way we treat objects—with dispatch. It happens naturally: when you are besieged by thousands of e-mails, texts, and messages—more than you can respond to—demands become depersonalized. Similarly, when we Tweet or write to hundreds or thousands of Facebook friends as a group, we treat individuals as a unit. Friends become fans. A college junior contemplating the multitudes he can contact on the Net says, “I feel that I am part of a larger thing, the Net, the Web. The world. It becomes a thing to me, a thing I am part of. And the people, too, I stop seeing them as individuals, really. They are part of this larger thing.”
With sociable robots, we imagine objects as people. Online, we invent ways of being with people that turn them into something close to objects. The self that treats a person as a thing is vulnerable to seeing itself as one. It is important to remember that when we see robots as “alive enough” for us, we give them a promotion. If when on the net, people feel just “alive enough” to be “maximizing machines” for e-mails and messages, they have been demoted. These are fearful symmetries.
In Part One, we saw new connections with the robotic turn into a desire for communion that is no communion at all. Part Two also traces an arc that ends in broken communion. In online intimacies, we hope for compassion but often get the cruelty of strangers. As I explore the networked life and its effects on intimacy and solitude, on identity and privacy, I will describe the experience of many adults. Certain chapters focus on them almost exclusively. But I return again and again to the world of adolescents. Today’s teenagers grew up with sociable robots as playroom toys. And they grew up networked, sometimes receiving a first cell phone as early as eight. Their stories offer a clear view of how technology reshapes identity because identity is at the center of adolescent life. Through their eyes, we see a new sensibility unfolding.
These days, cultural norms are rapidly shifting. We used to equate growing up with the ability to function independently. These days always-on connection leads us to reconsider the virtues of a more collaborative self. All questions about autonomy look different if, on a daily basis, we are together even when we are alone.
The network’s effects on today’s young people are paradoxical. Networking makes it easier to play with identity (for example, by experimenting with an avatar that is interestingly different from you) but harder to leave the past behind, because the Internet is forever. The network facilitates separation (a cell phone allows children greater freedoms) but also inhibits it (a parent is always on tap). Teenagers turn away from the “real-time” demands of the telephone and disappear into role-playing games they describe as “communities” and worlds.” And yet, even as they are committed to a new life in the ether, many exhibit an unexpected nostalgia. They start to resent the devices that force them into performing their profiles; they long for a world in which personal information is not taken from them automatically, just as the cost of doing business. Often it is children who tell their parents to put away the cell phone at dinner. It is the young who begin to speak about problems that, to their eyes, their elders have given up on.
I interview Sanjay, sixteen. We will talk for an hour between two of his class periods. At the beginning of our conversation, he takes his mobile phone out of his pocket and turns it off.
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At the end of our conversation, he turns the phone back on. He looks at me ruefully, almost embarrassed. He has received over a hundred text messages as we were speaking. Some are from his girlfriend who, he says, “is having a meltdown.” Some are from a group of close friends trying to organize a small concert. He feels a lot of pressure to reply and begins to pick up his books and laptop so he can find a quiet place to set himself to the task. As he says good-bye, he adds, not speaking particularly to me but more to himself as an afterthought to the conversation we have just had, “I can’t imagine doing this when I get older.” And then, more quietly, “How long do I have to continue doing this?”