I promised her that when I joined Facebook I would record my first feelings, while the site was still new to me. My very first feelings now seem banal: I had to decide between “friending” plan A (this will be a place for people I actually know) and plan B (I will include people who contact me because they say they appreciate my work). I tried several weeks on plan A and then switched to the more inclusive Plan B, flattered by the attention of strangers, justifying my decision in professional terms.
But now that I had invited strangers into my life, would I invite myself into the lives of strangers? I would have anticipated not, until I did that very thing. I saw that one of my favorite authors was a Facebook friend of a friend. Seized by the idea that I might be this writer’s friend, I made my request, and he accepted me. The image of a cafeteria came to mind, and I had a seat at his virtual table. But I felt like a gatecrasher. I decided realistically that I was taking this way too seriously. Facebook is a world in which fans are “friends.” But of course, they are not friends. They have been “friended.” That makes all the difference in the world, and I couldn’t get high school out of my mind.
PRESENTATION ANXIETY
What are the truth claims in a Facebook profile? How much can you lie? And what is at stake if you do? Nancy, an eighteen-year-old senior at Roosevelt, answers this question. “On the one hand, low stakes, because no one is really checking.” Then, with a grimace, she says, “No, high stakes. Everyone is checking.” A few minutes later, Nancy comes back to the question: “Only my best friends will know if I lie a little bit, and they will totally understand.” Then she laughs. “All of this, it is, I guess, a bit of stress.”
11
At Cranston, a group of seniors describe that stress. One says, “Thirteen to eighteen are the years of profile writing.” The years of identity construction are recast in terms of profile production. These private school students had to write one profile for their applications to middle school, another to get into high school, and then another for Facebook. Now they are beginning to construct personae for college applications. And here, says Tom, “You have to have a slightly different persona for the different colleges to which you are applying: one for Dartmouth, a different one, say, for Wesleyan.” For this aficionado of profile writing, every application needs a different approach. “By the time you get to the questions for the college application, you are a professional profile writer,” he says. His classmate Stan describes his online profiles in great detail. Each serves a different purpose, but they must overlap, or questions of authenticity will arise. Creating the illusion of authenticity demands virtuosity. Presenting a self in these circumstances, with multiple media and multiple goals, is not easy work. The trick, says Stan, is in “weaving profiles together . . . so that people can see you are not too crazy. . . . What I learned in high school was profiles, profiles, profiles, how to make a me.”
Early in my study, a college senior warned me not to be fooled by “anyone you interview who tells you that his Facebook page is ‘the real me.’ It’s like being in a play. You make a character.” Eric, a college-bound senior at Hadley, a boys’ preparatory school in rural New Jersey, describes himself as savvy about how you can “mold a Facebook page.” Yet, even he is shocked when he finds evidence of girls using “shrinking” software to appear thinner on their profile photographs. “You can’t see that they do it when you look at the little version of the picture, but when you look at a big picture, you can see how the background is distorted.” By eighteen, he has become an identity detective. The Facebook profile is a particular source of stress because it is so important to high school social life. Some students feel so in its thrall that they drop out of Facebook, if only for a while, to collect themselves.
Brad, eighteen, a senior at Hadley, is about to take a gap year to do community service before attending a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. His parents are architects; his passion is biology and swimming. Brad wants to be part of the social scene at Hadley, but he doesn’t like texting or instant messaging. He is careful to make sure I know he is “no Luddite.” He has plenty of good things to say about the Net. He is sure that it makes it easier for insecure people to function. Sometimes the ability to compose his thoughts online “can be reassuring,” he says, because there is a chance to “think through, calculate, edit, and make sure you’re as clear and concise as possible.” But as our conversation continues, Brad switches gears. Even as some are able to better function because they feel in control, online communication also offers an opportunity to ignore other people’s feelings. You can avoid eye contact. You can elect not to hear how “hurt or angry they sound in their voice.” He says, “Online, people miss your body language, tone of voice. You are not really you.” And worst of all, online life has led him to mistrust his friends. He has had his instant messages “recorded” without his knowledge and forwarded on “in a cut-and-paste world.”
In fact, when I meet Brad in the spring of his senior year, he tells me he has “dropped out” of online life. “I’m off the Net,” he says, “at least for the summer, maybe for my year off until I go to college.” He explains that it is hard to drop out because all his friends are on Facebook. A few weeks before our conversation, he had made a step toward rejoining but immediately he felt that he was not doing enough to satisfy its demands. He says that within a day he felt “rude” and couldn’t keep up. He felt guilty because he didn’t have the time to answer all the people who wrote to him. He says that he couldn’t find a way to be “a little bit” on Facebook—it does not easily tolerate a partial buy-in. Just doing the minimum was “pure exhaustion.”
In the world of Facebook, Brad says, “your minute movie preferences matter. And what groups you join. Are they the right ones?” Everything is a token, a marker for who you are:
When you have to represent yourself on Facebook to convey to anyone who doesn’t know you what and who you are, it leads to a kind of obsession about minute details about yourself. Like, “Oh, if I like the band State Radio and the band Spoon, what does it mean if I put State Radio first or Spoon first on my list of favorite musical artists? What will people think about me?” I know for girls, trying to figure out, “Oh, is this picture too revealing to put? Is it prudish if I don’t put it?” You have to think carefully for good reason, given how much people will look at your profile and obsess over it. You have to know that everything you put up will be perused very carefully. And that makes it necessary for you to obsess over what you do put up and how you portray yourself.... And when you have to think that much about what you come across as, that’s just another way that ... you’re thinking of yourself in a bad way.
For Brad, “thinking of yourself in a bad way” means thinking of yourself in reduced terms, in “short smoke signals” that are easy to read. To me, the smoke signals suggest a kind of reduction and betrayal. Social media ask us to represent ourselves in simplified ways. And then, faced with an audience, we feel pressure to conform to these simplifications. On Facebook, Brad represents himself as cool and in the know—both qualities are certainly part of who he is. But he hesitates to show people online other parts of himself (like how much he likes Harry Potter). He spends more and more time perfecting his online Mr. Cool. And he feels pressure to perform him all the time because that is who he is on Facebook.
At first Brad thought that both his Facebook profile and his college essays had gotten him into this “bad way” of thinking, in which he reduces himself to fit a stereotype. Writing his Facebook profile felt to him like assembling cultural references to shape how others would see him. The college essay demanded a victory narrative and seemed equally unhelpful: he had to brag, and he wasn’t happy. But Brad had a change of heart about the value of writing his college essays. “In the end I learned a lot about how I write and think—what I know how to think about and some things, you know, I really can’t think about them well at all.” I ask him if Facebook might offer these kinds of opportunities. He is adamant that it does not: “You get reduced to a list of favorite things. ‘List your favorite music’—that gives you no liberty at all about how to say it.” Brad says that “in a conversation, it might be interesting that on a trip to Europe with my parents, I got interested in the political mural art in Belfast. But on a Facebook page, this is too much information. It would be the kiss of death. Too much, too soon, too weird. And yet . . . it is part of who I am, isn’t it? . . . You are asked to make a lot of lists. You have to worry that you put down the ‘right’ band or that you
don’t
put down some Polish novel that nobody’s read.” And in the end, for Brad, it is too easy to lose track of what is important:
What does it matter to anyone that I prefer the band Spoon over State Radio? Or State Radio over Cake? But things like Facebook . . . make you think that it really does matter.... I look at someone’s profile and I say, “Oh, they like these bands.” I’m like, “Oh, they’re a poser,” or “they’re really deep, and they’re into good music.” We all do that, I think. And then I think it doesn’t matter, but ... the thing is, in the world of Facebook it
does
matter. Those minute details
do
matter.
Brad, like many of his peers, worries that if he is modest and doesn’t put down all of his interests and accomplishments, he will be passed over. But he also fears that to talk about his strengths will be unseemly. None of these conflicts about self presentation are new to adolescence or to Facebook. What is new is living them out in public, sharing every mistake and false step. Brad, attractive and accomplished, sums it up with the same word Nancy uses: “Stress. That’s what it comes down to for me. It’s just worry and stressing out about it.” Now Brad only wants to see friends in person or talk to them on the telephone. “I can just act how I want to act, and it’s a much freer way.” But who will answer the phone?
CHAPTER 10
No need to call
“S
o many people hate the telephone,” says Elaine, seventeen. Among her friends at Roosevelt High School, “it’s all texting and messaging.” She herself writes each of her six closest friends roughly twenty texts a day. In addition, she says, “there are about forty instant messages out, forty in, when I’m at home on the computer.” Elaine has strong ideas about how electronic media “levels the playing field” between people like her—outgoing, on the soccer team, and in drama club—and the shy: “It’s only on the screen that shy people open up.” She explains why: “When you can think about what you’re going to say, you can talk to someone you’d have trouble talking to. And it doesn’t seem weird that you pause for two minutes to think about what you’re going to say before you say it, like it would be if you were actually talking to someone.”
Elaine gets specific about the technical designs that help shy people express themselves in electronic messaging. The person to whom you are writing shouldn’t be able to see your process of revision or how long you have been working on the message. “That could be humiliating.” The best communication programs shield the writer from the view of the reader. The advantage of screen communication is that it is a place to reflect, retype, and edit. “It is a place to hide,” says Elaine.
The notion that hiding makes it easier to open up is not new. In the psychoanalytic tradition, it inspired technique. Classical analysis shielded the patient from the analyst’s gaze in order to facilitate free association, the golden rule of saying whatever comes to mind. Likewise, at a screen, you feel protected and less burdened by expectations. And, although you are alone, the potential for almost instantaneous contact gives an encouraging feeling of already being together. In this curious relational space, even sophisticated users who know that electronic communications can be saved, shared, and show up in court, succumb to its illusion of privacy. Alone with your thoughts, yet in contact with an almost tangible fantasy of the other, you feel free to play. At the screen, you have a chance to write yourself into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you wish to them to be, constructing them for your purposes.
1
It is a seductive but dangerous habit of mind. When you cultivate this sensibility, a telephone call can seem fearsome because it reveals too much.
Elaine is right in her analysis: teenagers flee the telephone. Perhaps more surprisingly, so do adults. They claim exhaustion and lack of time; always on call, with their time highly leveraged through multitasking, they avoid voice communication outside of a small circle because it demands their full attention when they don’t want to give it.
Technologies live in complex ecologies. The meaning of any one depends on what others are available. The telephone was once a way to touch base or ask a simple question. But once you have access to e-mail, instant messaging, and texting, things change. Although we still use the phone to keep up with those closest to us, we use it less outside this circle.
2
Not only do people say that a phone call asks too much, they worry it will be received as demanding too much. Randolph, a forty-six-year-old architect with two jobs, two young children, and a twelve-year-old son from a former marriage, makes both points. He avoids the telephone because he feels “tapped out.... It promises more than I’m willing to deliver.” If he keeps his communications to text and e-mail, he believes he can “keep it together.” He explains, “Now that there is e-mail, people expect that a call will be more complicated. Not about facts. A fuller thing. People expect it to take time—or else you wouldn’t have called.”