Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (11 page)

Is there a cure for FOMO? We need to remember that we’re seeing only a tiny snippet of what a person chooses to post. What people post or don’t post on social networks isn’t indicative of what they’re actually doing. We have no idea what someone’s life is like behind closed doors. We’re not seeing photos of the dog peeing on the rug or of people fighting with their significant others.

Probably other people are looking at our posts and feeling the exact same way about us. Yet we allow ourselves to feel jealous and competitive. Sometimes when I see other people having fun, celebrating success, and (humble)bragging about it online, I get familiar pangs of envy, especially if it’s been a tough day at the office or I’m home with a sick child. But then I remind myself that it’s always better to feel happy for others. Tomorrow, the situation could be reversed, and you would want your friends to be happy for you! If people post something that truly makes you feel left out or upset, call them up and
talk it through.
They’re your friends for a reason. Give them the benefit of the doubt.

Recently, there’s been a trend of people sending out actual “non-invites” to events. These are apologies to people you know you’re not going to invite to, for example, your wedding, and you want to give them the courtesy of a heads-up, presumably to defuse the awkwardness of them seeing the photos afterward online and feeling surprised. I personally think this is a terrible thing to do. I understand that it’s difficult to tell people they aren’t invited to your event. It’s never fun to confront people, or surprise or disappoint them. But this is exactly the kind of situation where it’s better to address things directly. If people feel close enough to you to be really taken aback by not receiving an invitation, you need to address that in person or over the phone rather than hide behind a computer screen or a postage stamp.

There is one additional, extremely tricky part of online relationships: how to end one online. Even talking about unfriending is uncomfortable for many people. Young girls in the Girl Scouts used to sing “Make new friends and keep the old,” not “Make new friends and unfriend the old.” And there’s nothing quite as uncomfortable as running into someone in person who you’ve unfriended. A 2013 research study by Chris Sibona at the University of Colorado Denver Business School found that 40 percent of the 582 respondents admitted to purposely avoiding, in real life, people they had unfriended on Facebook, especially when the reasons for the unfriending were bad.

During the writing of this book, I had several animated discussions with friends about the pros, cons, and etiquette of removing people from your friends list. Most unfrienders fell into one of two camps. There are those who never unfriend anyone because it’s mean, and they don’t want to lose a potentially valuable contact, colleague, or friend of a friend. A subset of this camp consists of those who are so Zen that they just don’t care who’s on their friends list. Then there are the enthusiastic, serial unfrienders, deleting people for even the slightest offense or as soon as a friendship has outlived its promise.

I am a proponent of a middle way. Unfriending should take the form of a periodic spring cleaning of people you may have met at some point but with whom you haven’t had any meaningful communication or interaction in a long time.

I know. Unfriending feels mean, like you’re going out of your way to erase a person from your life, and you owe them an explanation. But the act of occasionally pruning mystery “friends” from your friends list is a perfectly okay thing to do and ought to mean nothing more than saying, “Dear Acquaintance, I’m sorry, but I’ve forgotten who you are and I’m not sure I want you seeing photos of my kids.”

When you do unfriend, do it quietly and discreetly. Don’t be a jerk about it, and don’t post something to your wall about how
lucky
your remaining friends are for making the cut. Nobody likes to be unfriended, so don’t brag about it.

As for people whom you do interact with or see in person but are currently having an argument with, unfriending
them
is an entirely different matter. If you can work things out, then there’s no reason to use the “nuclear option” of immediate unfriending, leaving them standing alone at the party, so to speak. Maybe it’s better to let the friendship lie low for a while and unfriend during a regular spring cleaning session in the future.

Finally, if your relationship is torn beyond repair and there’s no hope of reconciliation, or if a person is toxic, harmful, and beyond help, then unfriend. But do so solemnly, for you might also be unfriended one day.

In the end, the new rules of the digital world are like the old rules: they center on empathy, understanding, and common sense. Always put yourself in other people’s shoes, care about the real people on the other side of the screen, and most important, always make the effort to invest time and attention in the people you care about.

Stop and Smell the Flowers

When I was in tenth grade, I had a music teacher who made a big impact on my life. One of his most memorable habits was to tell his students to “stop and smell the flowers.” We were fifteen or sixteen years old at the time, so we used to laugh at this and dismiss it. “Have you stopped to smell the flowers today?” we’d joke before entering his class.

A couple of years ago, he passed away. As I thought about the role he had played in my life, I found myself fondly remembering that enigmatic phrase: “Remember, kids. Stop and smell the flowers.” Why did he used to say it? What exactly did he mean?

Finally, while writing this book, I completely understood what he meant.

In the spring of 2013, I spent a few weeks in Tokyo with my husband and son. When I wasn’t writing, I made a conscious effort to leave my phone behind, unplug, and spend time paying attention to just my husband and son—no phone, no tablet, no computer. I was completely unreachable to the outside world for hours at a time. Japan is a beautiful and mesmerizing country. To savor every moment, I had to
live
in each moment. And even though Asher would probably not remember the trip, I wanted our time and experiences together to leave an impression.

In the evenings, happy and filled with the feeling of a day well spent and every meeting, visit, and encounter stuffed with productive moments and honest face-to-face conversations, I would open my laptop and dive back into the online world. The browser would instantly fill with tabs for e-mail and various websites.

You’d think it would be a stressful return to the reality of a hyperconnected existence. But honestly, it wasn’t. I was refreshed and better able to prioritize what I wanted to respond to—what needed an immediate response versus what could wait.

For most of us these days, in our culture of responsiveness, work is often an unwelcome and uninvited guest on our vacations. According to a recent study by Fierce Inc., 58 percent of workers feel absolutely no stress relief from their vacations, and 28 percent return even more stressed than they were before they left. Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that employees who disconnected from work for at least one full weekend day each week reported higher job satisfaction and had an increased likelihood of staying with the company longer.

According to some experts, checking e-mail only a few times a day, not checking e-mail first thing in the morning, and limiting the amount of time spent answering e-mail altogether, are highly effective productivity tools. Researchers at the University of North Carolina have found that when people take time out to meditate, they feel more upbeat and socially connected, and they begin to change their social habits. I hadn’t seen it in action in my own life until this recent trip.

Of course, I’m not saying that everyone can or should ditch their e-mail and phone for hours at a time. Abstaining from tech completely is generally not a good way to stay employed or run your social life.

Sometimes, however, if we want to really live in the moment with the people we’re with, then we have to turn off the phone and disconnect. We own the devices, not the other way around. There is a time to use technology and a time to put it away.

When it comes to finding tech–life balance, life always comes first. Don’t forget to stop and smell the flowers.

chapter 6

LOVE

Love in the Age of Facebook

I
t was a cold winter night in 2001. I was in Boston at a Harvard rager with my a cappella crew, the Harvard Opportunes.

Let me clarify that by “rager” I mean it was a relatively fun party. It wasn’t quite as intense as a scene from
The Social Network,
but unlike most of those scenes, this one actually happened. There was, however, an ice luge. Down which only the highest quality Wolfschmidt vodka was flowing.

Somewhere around the time the cheap vodka was beginning to taste somewhat tolerable, I met a lovely guy with a beautiful South African accent named Brent. The fact that he spent any time at all chatting with me and the Opportunes meant he must have really been a stand-up guy. (Let’s just say that the more we drank, the more we sang. . . .) But we talked for a while that evening. And at the end of the night, we exchanged IM screen names. In those pre-Facebook times, that was a big deal.

Of course, there were a couple of minor annoyances. For one, he had a girlfriend. Also, on the way out of the party, I made a graceful exit by falling into a bush. Oops.

The next day, I added “BrentT” to my AIM buddy list. I figured I’d never hear from him again.

Fast-forward two years.

A few months into my tenure with Ogilvy & Mather and the Naked Cowboys, I was working on my desktop computer while simultaneously chatting to my teammates on AIM about some edits to a client project. I was waiting for a colleague to get back to me when I heard a familiar
booeoop
sound.

It was BrentT.

“Hey there, Peggy42st, long time no see. Just wanted to say hi and let you know that I just got back from backpacking around Europe and I’m working in New York City now. If you’re free, maybe we can hang out sometime?”

Intriguing.

We arranged to meet later that night for margaritas at the bar below my office. I was anxious for the workday to end, and of course, as I was getting ready to leave, my boss tossed me a few more menial tasks to complete. Ten minutes late turned into twenty minutes, which turned into forty-five. Because we had arranged everything over IM, I didn’t have Brent’s cell phone number, but when I turned up at the bar over an hour late, he was still there, looking cool, with a salt-free margarita ready for me. We caught up and talked about work and life. He had broken up with his college girlfriend. We were both single.

By the second margarita, I had fallen hard for him. Twice, if you count the bush incident.

A few months later, my brother started “The Facebook.” By then, Brent and I were in a relationship—a relationship that blossomed into love, and then into marriage and family. So, I managed to bypass many of the experiences and complexities of dating in the digital age. Despite that, I still have a profound appreciation for the role technology played in making our relationship work.

If we hadn’t swapped IM names on that fateful evening, we would not have been able to serendipitously reconnect later. At the time, that was tech-enabled social life/dating.

Technology has completely changed all aspects of dating and romantic relationships. Countless apps and websites help people find potential mates to consider. Texting, video chatting, and social networks have created a whole new set of rules for initial courting and the early stages of relationships. Online sharing and a person’s relationship status mean that when you take a relationship to a new level offline, you also do so online. And ending a relationship means breaking up with that person in the digital world as well.

Once, if you were interested in someone and wanted to get to know him or her, you had to single-handedly build your own profile of all that person’s likes, dislikes, friendships, and interests in slow motion. You would try to run into the person at parties or discreetly ask your mutual friends to arrange “chance” encounters. Now, from the moment you see the words “friend request accepted,” you can have a complete dossier on the person’s life in seconds and find out where that person went to school, who that person’s friends are, and what that person wore for Halloween last year.

Before, if you met someone at a party and wanted to know if he or she was dating someone, you’d have to do some potentially embarrassing real-world reconnaissance. That information is now freely and easily available, along with—if you’re really too late—photographs of the person’s spouse. Now, when you start dating someone from outside your social circle, a Facebook friendship can establish that you share mutual friends, tastes in books, music, movies, and a sickeningly cute dog named Boo.

Lovers, separated by distance, were once forced to rely on letters and timely phone calls to connect. Now, the Internet makes communication easy across any distance.

Of course, things can go terribly wrong. Social networking can make everything go from weird to bad, fast.

The Broadcast Relationship

When Facebook started, it sort of resembled its namesake—an actual book with faces. Everyone’s home page was an identical static page that displayed new wall posts and messages but little else. If your friends edited their profiles, the only way for you to find out about it was if you actively visited their profiles and worked out what had changed since your last visit. It was a tedious game of spot-the-difference. Social networking was about to change the world, but in 2005, Facebook was a pretty basic reference guide.

Reasoning that the online social world would be vastly improved if users had instant, easy access to the social lives of their friends, Facebook created News Feed to automatically broadcast users’ posts, profile changes, photos, and friendships and collate that information into a single list of stories that everyone would see when signing in. Today, News Feed is an integral part of every user’s Facebook experience and what makes the service so incredibly powerful. Instead of just a home page, Facebook now feels like an actual home—a place for people.

A few weeks before News Feed launched on the site for everyone to use, Facebook employees got to test it out. This is what is known in Silicon Valley as “dogfooding”—people who work at tech companies “eat their own dog food” by using their own products.

Cue one of the very first awkward Facebook relationship updates. Two Facebook employees—let’s call them Joe and Sara—were dating at the time. They had a real hot-and-cold relationship, and everyone was aware that things had been a bit frosty lately. I was close friends with Sara—once a week we’d go to the gym after work and then catch up over salads and white wine—so I witnessed most of the drama firsthand. But we all just assumed they’d get back together, as always. So, you can imagine everyone’s shock when the entire office found out—via News Feed, the very first morning we started testing the product—that this time Joe and Sara had broken up for good.

That day, as people throughout the office logged in to Facebook, they were greeted with the top story in their News Feeds, a bright red broken heart next to Joe’s and Sara’s names. “Joe and Sara are no longer in a relationship,” read the short and brutal caption.

There were murmurs around the office, gossip in the bathrooms, and sympathetic and curious glances toward the new singles, who had likely figured that they would lie low for a few days before word started to spread.

But, hey, at least News Feed worked.

We had stumbled onto something incredibly powerful, and it wasn’t because we had succeeded in making interoffice dating even more awkward than it was already. We had changed something fundamental about the nature of social interaction. No longer would it be a challenge to stay up to date with your friends’ lives, and no longer would you need to hang out by the watercooler to hear the latest gossip. That information would be broadcast to you directly, like a daily friendship gazette featuring just you and your friends. For the first time, technology was making news about friends as newsworthy and accessible as news from a newspaper.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The Joe and Sara story highlights an awkward moment, but the vast majority of the updates we see are incredibly positive. Even if we could go back to the world before the feed, we would lose so much by doing so. There’s a reason we used to hang out at the watercooler to gossip! Now the watercooler is online, and all our friends are there. But as Joe, Sara, and the rest of the world soon figured out, this means our romantic relationships have an unprecedented new public dimension that has yet to be fully understood.

This is what I call the “broadcast relationship.”

The broadcast relationship isn’t a phenomenon limited to News Feed or even Facebook. It’s not something that we choose to have or that we can avoid. It’s the reality of what all our relationships have become, thanks to being connected in so many ways through the Internet, social networks, and mobile phones. Now that we can share and experience every moment of our lives with our friends as soon as they happen, technology has turned relationships into entire narratives that now play out online like miniature soap operas—from first meeting to last, photo tagging to de-tagging, friending to unfriending to refriending.

The result of all these interactions taking place in sight of our friends and the entire world is that relationships are not just defined by the moments experienced together in person but also by the broadcast and the reception.

Think about the presidential debates we watch every four years. A candidate might win the room, but the real peanut gallery is at the other end of the screen, and that’s where the debate is won.

We’re all candidates running for romantic office. We all want to impress the people we’re dating, by taking them to fancy restaurants, springing for the extra-fancy bottles of wine, and putting up with their annoying friends. But now we can’t just impress in the moment. The perceptions they form about us are also shaped by how the narrative of our relationships plays out online. What if you don’t look good in your photos together? What if your friends aren’t excited when you become “Facebook official”? What if you secretly loathe that the other person listed Nickelback as a music interest?

These questions might seem silly. Who cares what your friends think about your date? Why should you care about your online relationship when the real relationship is good?

These questions are important, because in a world of authentic online identity, there is increasingly little difference between our real and our online selves. The two cannot be thought of separately. So, in the world of the broadcast relationship, everything that happens in our relationships affects our online identities as individuals and, as couples, becomes part of our
shared
identities.

This creates all sorts of complex new considerations for relationships. For example, when you start dating someone, pretty much the first thing you want to know is “What’s that person’s profile like?” That’s because you want to know his or her identity and find out if it’s compatible with yours. The discussion that always began with “Are we a couple?” now has to end with “When do we make this official online?” The moment you make things official, you’re inviting the approval and judgment of your entire online community.

It’s not just the things that are announced by consent in a relationship that hit the Internet and that become public knowledge. Everything from the location of a date to the contents of a dinner plate can be tweeted, Instagrammed, uploaded, liked, and commented on, with or without your knowledge and approval.

I’ve known plenty of people who sneak off to the bathroom during a date to update their friends via Facebook on the progress of it. One episode of the Bravo show I produced,
Start-Ups: Silicon Valley,
featured larger-than-life entrepreneur Sarah Austin “life-casting” her date and getting caught by him in the act.
Big no-no.

Another friend uses codes on Twitter to live-update her followers on how her dates are going. Only a few of us know her secret code system, and I won’t give it up.

It’s worth mentioning that, thankfully, most people
don’t
live-update their dates. And many people avoid social media altogether during the courting process.

Beyond even these novel pressures on our relationships, broadcasting our relationships can simply be stressful and exhausting, and something that makes the pursuit of our tech–life balance even more difficult. There are three important things we need to think about: intimacy, shared expectations, and identity.

You Can’t Tag Intimacy

In early 2008, Brent and I were preparing to go to Jamaica for our wedding. Our bags were almost packed. An airplane ticket had been purchased for my dress (not joking, although I wish I was), and I was due to head down to Jamaica a week early with my mom, to make sure everything was set. Of course, nothing in life ever goes as planned. Two days before I was to leave, we got a call from the rabbi who was going to perform the ceremony in Jamaica, making sure we had been legally married in the United States. Brent and I looked at each other. “What? How could we have missed that oh-so-little-detail of, you know,
getting married before we got married
!?” We weren’t sure if he had forgotten to tell us that we needed to first do a legal ceremony in the States, as the Jamaican wedding wouldn’t be legal, or if we were the ones who had forgotten, but either way, we were scrambling.