When I tell Audrey about my month in Rome, she gives me the smile of a coconspirator. She offers that she has done “that kind of thing as well.” The previous summer she went on a school trip to Puerto Rico. “I wore kinds of shorts and tops that I would never wear at home. There, my reputation isn’t on the line; there’s no one I care about judging me or anything, so why not?” Audrey and I talk about the difference between our transgressive real-world travels—mine to Italy, hers to Puerto Rico—and what she can do online. Once our respective trips were over, we were back at home with our vigilant families and everyday identities. But Audrey can go online and dress her avatars in sexy outfits whenever she wants. Her racier self is always a few clicks away on Italian MySpace. She can keep her parallel lives open as windows on her screen.
WHAT HAPPENS ON FACEBOOK, STAYS ON ... ?
Every day Audrey expresses herself through a group of virtual personae. There are Facebook and Italian MySpace profiles; there are avatars in virtual worlds, some chat rooms, and a handful of online games. Identity involves negotiating all of these and the physical Audrey. When identity is multiple in this way, people feel “whole” not because they are
one
but because the relationships among aspects of self are fluid and undefensive. We feel “ourselves” if we can move easily among our many aspects of self.
7
I once worried that teenagers would experience this virtual nomadism as exhausting or confusing. But my concerns didn’t take into account that in online life, the
site supports the self.
Each site remembers the choices you’ve have made there, what you’ve said about yourself, and the history of your relationships. Audrey says it can be hard to decide where to go online, because where she goes means stepping into who she is in any given place, and in different places, she has different pastimes and different friends. What Pete called the “life mix” refers to more than combining a virtual life with a physically embodied one. Even for sixteen-year-old Audrey, many virtual lives are in play.
Not surprisingly, there are moments when life in the life mix gets tense. Audrey tells a story about a boy from school who was online with her and several of her girlfriends in the game World of Warcraft. They were all present as avatars, but each knew the real-life identity of the other players in their group. The online setting emboldened the normally shy young man, who, Audrey says, “became aggressive. He started talking tough.” Audrey says that online, she and her friends began to laugh at him, to tease him a bit, “because knowing who he is in person, we were like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” But the girls were also upset. They had never seen their friend behave like this. The next day, when they saw him at school, he just walked away. He could not own what had happened online. Shame about his virtual self changed his life in the real. Audrey calls this kind of thing the “spillover effect.” It happens frequently, she says, but “it is not a good thing.”
Audrey has developed a strategy to avoid such spillovers. If she is online in any setting where she knows the real identity of those with her, she treats what happens there as if it were shared under attorney-client privilege. Put otherwise, she takes an online space such as Facebook, where her identity is “known,” and reconstructs it as a place that will be more useful as a context for the much-needed moratorium. For Audrey, what happens on the Internet should stay on the Internet, at least most of the time. Audrey compares the Internet to Alcoholics Anonymous:
If you went to an AA group and you said, “I’m an alcoholic,” and your friend was there ... you don’t talk about it outside of there even if you two are in the same group. It’s that kind of understanding. So, on Facebook, I’m not anonymous. But not many people will bring up Internet stuff in real life.
Unless there’s a scandal, no one will call you on what you write on Facebook. It’s kind of a general consensus that you created your profile for a reason. No one’s going to question why you choose to put this or that in your “About Me” [a section of the Facebook profile]. People are just going to leave that alone. Especially if they actually know who you are, they don’t really care what you write on the Internet.
Audrey’s friends see her bend reality on Facebook but are willing to take her online self on its own terms. She offers them the same courtesy. The result is more leeway to experiment with emotions and ideas in digital life. Audrey says, “Even on AIM [the free instant messaging service offered by America Online], I could have long conversations with someone and the next day [in person] just be like, ‘Hey.’” You split the real and virtual to give the virtual the breathing space it needs.
Sometimes, says Audrey, “people take what they show online and try to bring it back to the rest of their lives,” but this to sorry effect. As an example, Audrey describes her “worst Internet fight.” It began in a chat room where she quarreled with Logan, a classmate. Feeling that she had been in the wrong, the next day Audrey told Logan she was sorry, face-to-face. This real-world apology did not quiet things down. Instead, Logan brought the quarrel back into the online world. He posted his side of the story to Audrey’s Facebook wall. Now, all of her friends could read about it. Audrey felt compelled to retaliate in kind. Now, his Facebook wall related her angry version of things. At school, Audrey and Logan shared many friends, who felt they had to take sides. Day after day, hours were spent in angry exchanges, with an expanding group of players.
What strikes Audrey most about this Internet fight is that, in the end, it had been “about close to nothing.” She explains, “I said something I shouldn’t have. I apologized. If it had happened at a party, it would have ended in five minutes.” But she had said it on the Internet, its own peculiar echo chamber. For Audrey, the hurt from this incident, six months in the past, is still raw: “We were really good friends, and now we don’t even look at each other in the hall.”
Audrey is comforted by the belief that she had done her best. Even though she had broken her rule about keeping the virtual and real separate, she insists that trying to make things “right” in person had given her friendship with Logan its best chance: “An online apology. It’s cheap. It’s easy. All you have to do is type ‘I’m sorry.’ You don’t have to have any emotion, any believability in your voice or anything. It takes a lot for someone to go up to a person and say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and that’s when you can really take it to heart. If someone’s going to take the easy way out and rely on text to portray all these forgiving emotions, it’s not going to work.” Eventually Logan did apologize, but only online. Accordingly, the apology failed: “It might have been different if he said it in person, but he didn’t. With an online apology, there are still unanswered questions: ‘Is he going to act weird to me now? Are we just going to be normal?’ You don’t know how the two worlds are going to cross.” An online apology is only one of the easy “shortcuts” that the Net provides. It is a world of many such temptations.
Audrey says that she took her worst shortcut a year before when she broke up with a boyfriend online. Teenage girls often refer to television’s
Sex and the City
to make a point about when not to text. In a much-discussed episode, the heroine’s boyfriend breaks up with her by leaving a Post-it note. You shouldn’t break up by Post-it note and you shouldn’t break up by text. Audrey says she knew this rule; her break up on instant messenger had been a lapse. She still has not entirely forgiven herself:
I was afraid. I couldn’t do it on the phone, and I couldn’t do it in person. It was the kind of thing where I knew it had to end because I didn’t feel the same way, one of those things. I felt so bad, because I really did care for him, and I couldn’t get myself to say it. It was one of those.... I wasn’t trying to chicken out, I just couldn’t form the words, so I had to do it online, and I wish I hadn’t. He deserved to have me do it in person.... I’m very sorry for it. I just think it’s a really cold move, and kind of lame.
Audrey was still so upset by the online breakup that in our conversation, she comes to her own defense. She tells me about a time when she behaved better: “I was in an argument with a friend and I began to write a Facebook message about it but I stopped myself.” She explains that breaking up with a boyfriend online is very bad, but “well, at least you can just cut ties. With a friend you actually have to work it out. It’s not as easy as ‘I don’t want to be friends with you anymore.’” And now that friendships span the physical and virtual, you have to “work it out” across worlds.
Audrey’s etiquette for how to work things out across worlds is complicated. She finds face-to-face conversation difficult and avoids the telephone at all cost. Yet, as we’ve seen, she also thinks there are things that should only be done face-to-face, like breaking up with a boy and the “whole heartfelt baring of souls.” When her parents separated, she had to move and change school districts. She was disappointed when one of her friends at her former school sent her an instant message to tell her she would be missed. Audrey’s comment: “It was really sweet, but I just wished that—it would have meant so much more if we could’ve done that face-to-face. And I understood. We don’t see each other every day, and if you feel it right now, on the Internet, you can tell them right now; you don’t have to wait or anything. I really appreciated it, but it was different reading it than hearing it in her voice.”
As Audrey tells me this story, she becomes aware that she is suggesting a confusing set of rules. She tries to impose some order: “I try to avoid the telephone, I like texting and instant messaging, and I am so often on Facebook that I probably give the impression that I want everything to happen online.” But some things, such as a friend’s good-bye to a friend, she wants to have happen in person. Like Tara and Leona, Audrey makes no suggestion that “talking” on a telephone could ever be of much help. Telephones are for logistical arrangements, if complicated (often overlapping) text messages have confused a situation.
When Audrey considers whether her school friend said good-bye in a text because she didn’t care or wasn’t “brave enough to say something nice face-to-face,” Audrey admits that the latter is more likely and that she can identify with this.
8
If you send fond feelings or appreciation digitally, you protect yourself from a cool reception. One of the emotional affordances of digital communication is that one can always hide behind deliberated nonchalance.
FINER DISTINCTIONS
“Whassup?” Reynold, a sixteen-year-old at Silver Academy, a small urban Catholic high school in Pennsylvania, savors the phrase. “With instant messaging, ‘Whassup?’ is all you need to say.” Reynold makes it clear that IM does not require “content.” You just need to be there; your presence says you are open to chat. A text message is more demanding: “You need more of a purpose. Texting is for ‘Where are you, where am I, let’s do this, let’s do that.’” Among friends, however, “texting can be just as random as IM.” Reynold likes this: “Among close friends, you can text to just say ‘Whassup?’”
I discuss online communications with eight junior and senior boys at Silver who eagerly take up Reynold’s question: When should one use texting, IM, Facebook wall posts, or Facebook and MySpace messaging? (Messaging on social networks is the closest these students get to e-mailing except to deal with teachers and college and job applications.) One senior is critical of those who don’t know the rules: “Some people try to have conversations on texts, and I don’t like that.” In this group, there is near consensus that one of the pleasures of digital communication is that it does not need a message. It can be there to trigger a feeling rather than transmit a thought. Indeed, for many teenagers who discover their feelings by texting them, communication is the place where feelings are born.
Not far into this conversation, the emphasis on nonchalance runs into the complication that Audrey signaled: the composition of any message (even the most seemingly casual) is often studied. And never more so than when dealing with members of the opposite sex. John, sixteen, is an insecure young man with a crush who turns to a Cyrano, digital style. When he wants to get in touch with a girl he really likes, John hands his phone over to a friend he knows to be skilled at flirting by text. In fact, he has several stand-ins. When one of these friends does his texting, John is confident that he sounds good to his Roxanne. In matters of the heart, the quality of one’s texts is as crucial as the choice of communications medium.
High school students have a lot to say about what kinds of messages “fit” with what kinds of media. This, one might say, is their generational expertise. Having grown up with new media that had no rules, they wrote some out of necessity. At Richelieu, Vera, a sophomore, says that texting brings “social pressure” because when she texts someone and the person does not get back to her, she takes it hard. With instant messaging, she feels less pressure because “if somebody doesn’t get back to you, well, you can just assume they stepped away from their computer.” Her classmate Mandy disagrees: “When I am ignored on IM, I get very upset.” Two other classmates join the conversation. One tells Mandy that her reaction is “silly” and betrays a misunderstanding of “how the system works.” A gentler girl tries to reason Mandy out of her hurt feelings: “Everyone knows that on IM, it is assumed you are busy, talking with other people, doing your homework, you don’t have to answer.” Mandy is not appeased: “I don’t care. When I send a message out, it is hurtful if I don’t get anything back.”