The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection (7 page)

That memory of a quieter yesteryear is dearly useful. Awake—or at least partly so—to the tremendous influence of today’s tech-littered landscape, I have the choice to say yes and no to the wondrous utility of these machines, their promise and power. I do not know that Benjamin will have that same choice.

Regardless, the profound revelations of neuroplasticity research are constantly reinscribing the fundamental truth that we never really outgrow our environments. That the old, like the young, are vulnerable to any brave new world they find themselves walking through. The world we fashion for ourselves, or think we fashion, remains an insistent shaper of our minds until the day we die. So, in fact, we are all Kids These Days.

Despite the universality of this change, which we’re all buffeted by, there is a single, seemingly small change that I’ll be most sorry about. It will sound meaningless, but: One doesn’t see teenagers staring into space anymore. Gone is the idle mind of the adolescent.

I think that strange and wonderful things occur to us in those youthful time snacks, those brief reprieves when the fancy wanders. We know that many scientists and artists spring from childhoods of social deprivation. The novels of Anthony Trollope, for example, are the products of a friendless youth. He describes in his autobiography years and years of boyish daydreaming, which continued in adulthood:

Other boys would not play with me
. . . . Thus it came to pass that I was always going about with some castle in the air. . . . There can, I imagine, hardly be a more dangerous mental practice; but I have often doubted whether, had it not been my practice, I should ever have written a novel. I learned in this way to maintain an interest in a fictitious story, to dwell on a work created by my own imagination, and to live in a world altogether outside the world of my own material life.

Solitude may cause discomfort, but that discomfort is often a healthy and inspiring sort. It’s only in moments of absence that a daydreaming person like Anthony Trollope can receive truly unexpected notions. What will become of all those surreptitious gifts when our blank spaces are filled in with duties to “social networks” and the relentless demands of our tech addictions?

I fear we are the last of the daydreamers. I fear our children will lose lack, lose absence, and never comprehend its quiet, immeasurable value. If the next generation socializes more online than in the so-called real world, and if they have no memory of a time when the reverse was true, it follows that my peers and I are the last to feel the static surrounding online socialization. The Internet becomes “the real world” and our physical reality becomes the thing that needs to be defined and set aside—“my analog life,” “my snail life,” “my empty life.”

Montaigne once wrote, “
We must reserve a back shop
, all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.” But where will tomorrow’s children set up such a shop, when the world seems to conspire against the absentee soul?

The highest and most beautiful things
in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.

—Søren Kierkegaard

THE
third most Googled person in 2012 was a small fifteen-year-old girl from Port Coquitlam—a nondescript Canadian town composed mainly of box stores, parking lots, and teenagers with nothing to do.
The girl’s name was Amanda Todd
. She liked cheerleading—being petite, she got to be the girl at the top of the pyramid. And she liked to sing—she would perform covers before her computer’s camera and post the videos on YouTube under an account titled SomeoneToKnow. In these, her adolescent pursuits, she was entirely typical. But when Amanda Todd killed herself on Wednesday, October 10, a different light was cast on her seemingly ordinary life; within days, media alighted on the most notorious cyberbullying case in history.

I will not fill these pages with a detailed account of the years of abuse that led up to her death (that story is readily available on the Internet, which proved such an entrenched and toxic commentator on Todd). Suffice it to say that when still in grade seven, she was convinced by an unidentified man to expose her breasts via webcam. That man then proceeded to blackmail and harass her with the captured image of her nude body for years. (“Put on a show for me,” he would later order.) Todd became the subject of a tormenting Facebook profile, which featured her breasts as its profile picture. She attended three schools in the space of a year in an effort to avoid the ensuing harassment from peers. She was beaten by a gang of young girls (while others stood by and recorded the scene on their phones). And, eventually, Todd became so paranoid and anxious that she could not leave her home. She first attempted to kill herself by drinking from a bottle of bleach, which was unsuccessful and led to more of the online bullying that drove her to that action in the first place.

Then, a month before her death, Todd posted a video on her YouTube channel, unpacking her troubled story. This time she wasn’t singing someone else’s song, but describing for viewers (in a broken way, for she suffered from a language-based learning disability) her own suffering. Naturally, this opened her again to the attacks of faceless online “commenters.” By stepping into the buzzing crowds of Internet forums, we hazard a deep cruelty. While Amanda Todd lived, these waves of ridicule pushed her toward more public confessions, which were broadcast over the very mass communication technologies that had spurred her distress. Later, after her suicide, she was transformed into a meme and a hashtag, bandied about online in a series of suicide jokes and vandalisms on her memorial pages. She is taunted in death even more than she was in life.

What interests me more than the common tale of online abuse, though, is the outlet that Todd turned to as a balm for her wounds—the video she posted as a final creative act. She turned, against all reason except perhaps that of an addict, to the very thing that made her suffer so. She turned to an online broadcast technology. When I first read about this tortured girl, I kept wondering how much we all subvert our emotional lives into our technologies; how much of the pain and suffering we each live with is now funneled away from traditional outlets (diaries, friends, counselors) and toward an online network that promises solace.

Two weeks after Todd killed herself, her mother, Carol, sat on a black sofa and spoke to the media. “It’s not about a child who . . . just sat on her computer in her room,” she said. She spoke with a soft and uncertain voice.
She did not look into the camera
. She tried to describe her daughter’s state of mind in the days leading up to that final act. “She realized the error in her actions, but that error couldn’t be erased. . . . She tried to forget, she tried to make it go away. She tried to change schools. But wherever she went, it followed her.” The footage is hard to watch; Carol Todd looks understandably distraught and annoyed by the attention of the media. In the end, she bites her lip, says to the scores of imagined “bad mom” accusers, “Amanda was born into the right family.” And then she asks for the camera to be turned off.

When, months later, I asked Carol Todd for an interview, she deferred or canceled our meeting a half-dozen times; her reasons sometimes seemed genuine and sometimes not. I’d resigned myself to not meeting her at all when she had an apparent change of heart and asked me to lunch. So I traveled to her hometown and sat myself down at a restaurant she likes called Earl’s, where pretty, polished girls, about the age Amanda would be by now, brought us our sandwiches and coffee.

Carol Todd—in thick-rimmed glasses and a black hoodie—seemed a sedate woman, though a determined one. She was guarded when she met me, having already grown hardened by the treatment of media following her daughter’s death. And she had another reason to be suspicious: In the wake of everything, she’d become a victim of cyberbullying herself. A few committed individuals from around the world send her messages, attacks on her daughter, attacks on herself. They are relentless. In several e-mails she sent me before and after our interview, she expressed her anxiety about the “haters” who were “out there.”

Like her daughter, Carol responded to such harassment not by retreating, but by broadcasting herself more. She began to maintain a regular blog, where she advocates for reform in schools and governments. She set up a legacy fund to support her cause and speaks to politicians or packed gymnasiums about her experience. She has even produced a line of clothing and wristbands, emblazoned with her daughter’s name, to raise funds. When YouTube took down Amanda’s video in the days following her death, Carol requested that the video be made live again because “
it was something that needed to be watched by many
.”

She tells me that something in the world was stirred following her daughter’s death. “Amanda put herself out there. I mean, she wasn’t an angel; I’m the first to admit that. But she did what she did, and I do think it woke up the world.” The media outlets that picked up the story include
The New Yorker,
Anderson Cooper 360º,
and
Dateline
. Vigils were held in thirty-eight countries.

“Amanda wasn’t unique in having all this happen to her, though,” I said. “Why did she become such a rallying force?”

“Well, it was the video, obviously. It was always the video. If she hadn’t made that video, you wouldn’t be sitting here.”

She was right, of course. We have all, in some way, become complicit in the massive broadcasting that online life invites. But occasionally someone—usually a digital native like Amanda—will shock us awake by turning a banal thing like YouTube into a scorching confessional.

And everyone wants to hear a confession. On the evening of Todd’s death, her mother looked at the video and saw it had twenty-eight hundred views. The next morning, there were ten thousand. Two weeks later, the video had been watched
seventeen million times
.

It was uploaded to YouTube on September 7, 2012. The picture is black and white. Todd stands before the camera, visible from just below the eyes down to her waist. She holds up, and flips through, a series of flash cards that detail her travails of the few years previous. I still remember adolescent angst and bullying as a deeply private struggle, so for me it’s uncomfortable to watch her feed her trauma into a system like YouTube, to watch her give over so much of herself. The song “Hear You Me” by the band Jimmy Eat World plays softly in the background. Todd flips silently through her flash cards. The script on her cards is simple and, by adult standards, sentimental. It is also a naked cry for help that the YouTube community responded to with unavailing praise and cool scorn. The girls who physically assaulted Todd posted their own cruel comments within hours of the video’s being uploaded.

• • • • •

Extraordinary as Todd’s suicide may have been, we should pause here to note that the violence of her reaction to online harassment is not an anomaly. Recent research from Michigan State University found that, for example,
Singapore children who were bullied online
became just as likely to consider suicide as those who were bullied offline. In fact, researchers found that cyberbullying produced slightly more suicidal thoughts:
22 percent of students
who were physically bullied reported suicidal thoughts, and that number rose to 28 percent in the case of students who were bullied online.

Todd was hardly alone in all this. The stories of a heartless online world keep coming. I recently read about a University of Guelph student who decided to broadcast his suicide live online—using the notorious 4chan message board to attract an audience willing to watch him burn to death in his dorm room. (The twenty-year-old man was stopped midattempt and taken to the hospital with serious injuries.) His message to his viewers: “I thought I would finally give back to the community in the best way possible: I am willing to an hero [commit suicide]
⁶
on cam for you all.” Another 4chan user set up a video chat room for him. Two hundred watched (the chat room’s limit) as he downed pills and vodka before setting his room on fire and crawling under a blanket. As the fire began to consume him, the young man appears to have typed to his viewers from beneath the covers: “#omgimonfire.” Some users on the message board egged him on, suggesting more poetic ways to die. These desperate actions make for an extreme example, but I think they speak to something common in us, in fact. Most of us don’t wish to give our lives over entirely to the anonymous Internet, but there is yet a disturbing intensity to the self-broadcasting that most of us have learned to adore.

To some degree, we all live out our emotional lives through technologies. We’re led into deep intimacies with our gadgets precisely because our brains are imbued with a compulsion to socialize, to connect whenever possible, and connection is what our technologies are so good at offering. Some of my friends literally sleep with their phones and check their e-mail before rolling out of bed, as though the machine were a lover that demands a good-morning kiss. E-mails and tweets and blog posts might easily be dull or cruel—but the machine itself is blameless and feels like a true companion. The bond we have with our “user friendly” machines is so deep, in fact, it makes us confess things we would never confess to our suspect fellow humans.

Yet every time we use our technologies as a mediator for the chaotic elements of our lives, and every time we insist on
managing
our representation with a posted video or Facebook update, we change our relationship with those parts of our lives that we seek to control. We hold some part of the world at a distance, and since we are forever
of
the world, we end up holding some part of ourselves at a distance, too. The repercussions of this alienation can be trivial—I’ve heard from many young girls worried about whether some schoolmate has “friended” them or “followed” them—but they can also be deeply, irrevocably tragic.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when digital natives look for comfort in the very media that torments them. What else would they know to do? As Evgeny Morozov points out in
The Net Delusion,
if the only hammer you are given is the Internet, “it’s not surprising that
every possible social and political problem
is presented as an online nail.” Morozov expanded on that analogy in his more recent
To Save Everything, Click Here,
where he wrote: “It’s a very powerful set of hammers, and plenty of people—many of them in Silicon Valley—are dying to hear you cry, ‘Nail!’
regardless of what you are looking at
.” It’s easy, in other words, to become convinced that the solution to a tech-derived problem is more technology. Particularly when that technology has enveloped our entire field of vision. While someone of my generation might see that the Internet is not the entire toolbox, for Todd and her cohort, unplugging the problem—or at least the problem’s mouthpiece—isn’t an apparent option.

Without memories of an unplugged world, the subversion of human emotion to online management systems seems like the finest, most expedient, and certainly easiest way to deal.

Ultimately, we desire machines that can understand our feelings perfectly and even supervise our feelings for us.

There’s an entrenched irony, though, in our relationships with “social” media. They obliterate distance, yet make us lonely. They keep us “in touch,” yet foster an anxiety around physical interaction. As MIT’s Sherry Turkle put it so succinctly: “
We bend to the inanimate
with new solicitude.” In her interviews with youths about their use of technologies versus interactions with warm human bodies, the young regularly pronounce other people “risky” and technologies “safe.” Here is one of her more revealing interview subjects, Howard, discussing the potential for a robotic guardian:

There are things, which you cannot tell your friends
or your parents, which . . . you could tell an AI [artificial intelligence]. Then it would give you advice you could be more sure of. . . . I’m assuming it would be programmed with prior knowledge of situations and how they worked out. Knowledge of you, probably knowledge of your friends, so it could make a reasonable decision for your course of action. I know a lot of teenagers, in particular, tend to be caught up in emotional things and make some really bad mistakes because of that.

As yet, no such robot is ready for Howard.

• • • • •