Alone Together (38 page)
Authors: Sherry Turkle
At dinner, when Alice told Tara her about her sister’s death, Tara became upset, close to distraught. She and Alice had been e-mailing for months. Why hadn’t Alice told her about this? Alice explained that she had been taken up with her family, with arrangements. And she said, simply, “I didn’t think it was something to discuss over e-mail.” Herself in need of support, Alice ended up comforting Tara.
As Tara tells me this story, she says that she was ashamed of her reaction. Her focus should have been—and should now be—on Alice’s loss, not on her own ranking as a confidant. But she feels defensive as well. She had, after all, “been in touch.” She’d e-mailed; she’d made sure that their dinner got arranged. Tara keeps coming back to the thought that if she and Alice had spoken on the telephone to set up their dinner date, she would have learned about her friend’s loss. She says, “I would have heard something in her voice. I would have suspected. I could have drawn her out.” But for Tara, as for so many, the telephone call is for family. For friends, even dear friends, it is close to being off the menu.
Tara avoids the voice but knows she has lost something. For the young, this is less clear. I talk with Meredith, a junior at Silver Academy who several months before had learned of a friend’s death via instant message and had been glad that she didn’t have to see or speak to anyone. She says, “It was a day off, so I was at home, and I hadn’t seen anyone who lives around me, and then my friend Rosie IM’ed me and told me my friend died. I was shocked and everything, but I was more okay than I would’ve been if I saw people. I went through the whole thing not seeing anyone and just talking to people online about it, and I was fine. I think it would’ve been much worse if they’d told me in person.”
I ask Meredith to say more. She explains that when bad news came in an instant message, she was able to compose herself. It would have been “terrible,” she says, to have received a call. “I didn’t have to be upset in front of someone else.” Indeed, for a day after hearing the news, Meredith only communicated with friends by instant message. She describes the IMs as frequent but brief: “Just about the fact of it. Conversations like, ‘Oh, have you heard?’ ‘Yeah, I heard.’ And that’s it.” The IMs let her put her emotions at a distance. When she had to face other people at school, she could barely tolerate the rush of feeling: “The second I saw my friends, it got so much worse.” Karen and Beatrice, two of Meredith’s friends, tell similar stories. Karen learned about the death of her best friend’s father in an instant message. She says, “It was easier to learn about it on the computer. It made it easier to hear. I could take it in pieces. I didn’t have to look all upset to anyone.” Beatrice reflects, “I don’t want to hear bad things, but if it is just texted to me, I can stay calm.”
These young women prefer to deal with strong feelings from the safe haven of the Net. It gives them an alternative to processing emotions in real time. Under stress, they seek composure above all. But they do not find equanimity. When they meet and lose composure, they find a new way to flee: often they take their phones out to text each other and friends not in the room. I see a vulnerability in this generation, so quick to say, “Please don’t call.” They keep themselves at a distance from their feelings. They keep themselves from people who could help.
VOICESWhen I first read how it is through our faces that we call each other up as human beings, I remember thinking I have always felt that way about the human voice. But like many of those I study, I have been complicit with technology in removing many voices from my life.
I had plans for dinner with a colleague, Joyce. On the day before we were to meet, my daughter got admitted to college. I e-mailed Joyce that we would have much to celebrate. She e-mailed back a note of congratulations. She had been through the college admissions process with her children and understood my relief. At dinner, Joyce said that she had thought of calling to congratulate me, but a call had seemed “intrusive.” I admitted that I hadn’t called her to share my good news for the same reason. Joyce and I both felt constrained by a new etiquette but were also content to follow it. “I feel more in control of my time if I’m not disturbed by calls,” Joyce admitted.
Both Joyce and I have gained something we are not happy about wanting. License to feel together when alone, comforted by e-mails, excused from having to attend to people in real time. We did not set out to avoid the voice but end up denying ourselves its pleasures. For the voice can only be experienced in real time, and both of us are so busy that we don’t feel we have it to spare.
Apple’s visual voicemail for the iPhone was welcomed because it saves you the trouble of having to listen to a message to know who sent it. And now there are applications that automatically transcribe voicemail into text. I interview Maureen, a college freshman, who is thrilled to have discovered one of these programs. She says that only her parents send her voicemail: “I love my parents, but they don’t know how to use the phone. It’s not the place to leave long voice messages. Too long to listen to. Now, I can scroll through the voicemail as text messages. Great.”
Here, in the domain of connectivity, we meet the narrative of better than nothing becoming simply better. People have long wanted to connect with those at a distance. We sent letters, then telegrams, and then the telephone gave us a way to hear their voices. All of these were better than nothing when you couldn’t meet face-to-face. Then, short of time, people began to use the phone instead of getting together. By the 1970s, when I first noticed that I was living in a new regime of connectivity, you were never really “away” from your phone because answering machines made you responsible for any call that came in. Then, this machine, originally designed as a way to leave a message if someone was not at home, became a screening device, our end-of-millennium Victorian calling card. Over time, voicemail became an end in itself, not the result of a frustrated telephone call. People began to call purposely when they knew that no one would be home. People learned to let the phone ring and “let the voicemail pick it up.”
In a next step, the voice was taken out of voicemail because communicating with text is faster. E-mail gives you more control over your time and emotional exposure. But then, it, too, was not fast enough. With mobile connectivity (think text and Twitter), we can communicate our lives pretty much at the rate we live them. But the system backfires. We express ourselves in staccato texts, but we send out a lot and often to large groups. So we get even more back—so many that the idea of communicating with anything but texts seems too exhausting. Shakespeare might have said, we are “consumed with that which we are nourished by.”
11
11
I sketched out this narrative to a friend for whom it rang true as a description but seemed incredible all the same. A professor of poetry and a voracious reader, she said, “We cannot all write like Lincoln or Shakespeare, but even the least gifted among of us has this incredible instrument, our voice, to communicate the range of human emotion. Why would we deprive ourselves of that?”
The beginning of an answer has become clear: in text, messaging, and e-mail, you hide as much as you show. You can present yourself as you wish to be “seen.” And you can “process” people as quickly as you want to. Listening can only slow you down. A voice recording can be sped up a bit, but it has to unfold in real time. Better to have it transcribed or avoid it altogether. We work so hard to give expressive voices to our robots but are content not to use our own.
Like the letters they replace, e-mail, messaging, texting, and, more recently, Tweeting carry a trace of the voice. When Tara regretted that she had not called her friend Alice—on the phone she would have heard her friend’s grief—she expressed the point of view of someone who grew up with the voice and is sorry to have lost touch with it. Hers is a story of trying to rebalance things in a traditional framework. We have met Trey, her law partner. He confronts something different, something he cannot rebalance.
My brother found out that his wife is pregnant and he put it on his
blog.
He didn’t call me first. I called him when I saw the blog entry. I was mad at him. He didn’t see why I was making a big deal. He writes his blog every day, as things happen, that’s how he lives. So when they got home from the doctor—bam, right onto the blog. Actually, he said it was part of how he celebrated the news with his wife—to put it on the blog together with a picture of him raising a glass of champagne and she raising a glass of orange juice. Their idea was to celebrate on the blog, almost in real time, with the photos and everything. When I complained they made me feel like such a
girl.
Do you think I’m old-school?
12
Trey’s story is very different from Tara’s. Trey’s brother was not trying to save time by avoiding the telephone. His brother did not avoid or forget him or show preference to other family members. Blogging is part of his brother’s intimate life. It is how he and his wife celebrated the most important milestone in their life as a family. In a very different example of our new genres of online intimacy, a friend of mine underwent a stem cell transplant. I felt honored when invited to join her family’s blog. It is set up as a news feed that appears on my computer desktop. Every day, and often several times a day, the family posts medical reports, poems, reflections, and photographs. There are messages from the patient, her husband, her children, and her brother, who donated his stem cells. There is progress and there are setbacks. On the blog, one can follow this family as it lives, suffers, and rejoices for a year of treatment. Inhibitions lift. Family members tell stories that would be harder to share face-to-face. I read every post. I send e-mails. But the presence of the blog changes something in my behavior. I am grateful for every piece of information but feel strangely shy about calling. Would it be an intrusion? I think of Trey. Like him, I am trying to get my bearings in a world where the Net has become a place of intimate enclosure.
The Net provides many new kinds of space. On one end of the spectrum, I interview couples who tell me that they text or e-mail each other while in bed. Some say they want to leave a record of a request or a feeling “on the system.” And there are family blogs—places to announce a wedding or the progress of an illness or share photographs with the grandparents. These are all places to be yourself. At the other end of the spectrum, there are places where one constructs an avatar—from games to virtual communities—where people go to find themselves, or to lose themselves, or to explore aspects of themselves. On this spectrum, as we’ve seen, things are never clear-cut. As Audrey put it, a Facebook profile is “an avatar of me.” And when you play Ringo Starr on a simulation of the Beatles, your avatar may feel like a second self. In simulation culture we become cyborg, and it can be hard to return to anything less.
CHAPTER 11
Reduction and betrayal
I
n the mid-1990s, computer scientist and technological utopian Raymond Kurzweil created an avatar, Ramona, which he put into a virtual world. At that time, most players of online role-playing games had text-based avatars, complete with long descriptions of their histories and relationships, as well as the clothes they were wearing. Kurzweil looked forward to a new era. He didn’t want to describe himself as Grace Slick. He wanted to
be
Grace Slick. Kurzweil created a virtual world and made a beautiful, sexy avatar who sang before the psychedelic backdrops of his choosing. This was Ramona. In the real, Kurzweil wore high-tech gear that captured his every gesture and turned them into Ramona’s movements. His own voice was transformed into Ramona’s female voice. Watching Kurzweil perform as Ramona was mesmerizing. And Kurzweil himself was mesmerized. It was an occasion, he said, for him to reflect on the difficulties of inhabiting another body and on how he had to retrain his movements—the way he held his head, the shape of his gestures—to become an avatar of another gender. These days, certain aspects of that experience, once so revolutionary, have become banal. We have turned them into games.
n the mid-1990s, computer scientist and technological utopian Raymond Kurzweil created an avatar, Ramona, which he put into a virtual world. At that time, most players of online role-playing games had text-based avatars, complete with long descriptions of their histories and relationships, as well as the clothes they were wearing. Kurzweil looked forward to a new era. He didn’t want to describe himself as Grace Slick. He wanted to
be
Grace Slick. Kurzweil created a virtual world and made a beautiful, sexy avatar who sang before the psychedelic backdrops of his choosing. This was Ramona. In the real, Kurzweil wore high-tech gear that captured his every gesture and turned them into Ramona’s movements. His own voice was transformed into Ramona’s female voice. Watching Kurzweil perform as Ramona was mesmerizing. And Kurzweil himself was mesmerized. It was an occasion, he said, for him to reflect on the difficulties of inhabiting another body and on how he had to retrain his movements—the way he held his head, the shape of his gestures—to become an avatar of another gender. These days, certain aspects of that experience, once so revolutionary, have become banal. We have turned them into games.
One such game, The Beatles: Rock Band, was released in September 2009 and hailed by the
New York Times
as a “transformative entertainment experience.”
1
As in its older cousin, Rock Band, players hold game controllers in the shape of musical instruments and microphones that will transform the sounds they make into the sounds produced by screen avatars. Here the goal of play is to simulate the playing and singing of the Beatles. Such games are said to open music up to those who have no talent or no guitar. It is hoped that if children practice on such games, they will end up wanting to play a real instrument.
New York Times
as a “transformative entertainment experience.”
1
As in its older cousin, Rock Band, players hold game controllers in the shape of musical instruments and microphones that will transform the sounds they make into the sounds produced by screen avatars. Here the goal of play is to simulate the playing and singing of the Beatles. Such games are said to open music up to those who have no talent or no guitar. It is hoped that if children practice on such games, they will end up wanting to play a real instrument.
Like Kurzweil with Ramona, you have an avatar that you drive toward competency, and you have all that goes on in your head. The game sets you up not just to perform as a rock star but to feel like one, with all the attendant dreams and fantasies.
In online worlds and massively multiplayer online role-playing games, you have virtuosity and fantasy—and something more: your performances put you at the center of a new community with virtual best friends and a sense of belonging. It is not unusual for people to feel more comfortable in an unreal place than a real one because they feel that in simulation they show their better and perhaps truer self. With all of this going on, who will hold a brief for the real?
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