Alone Together (49 page)
Authors: Sherry Turkle
We met Robin, twenty-six, who works as a copywriter in a large and highly competitive advertising agency. She describes the demands of her job as “crushing.” She has her BlackBerry with her at all times. She does not put it in her purse; she holds it. At meals, she sets it on the table near her, touching it frequently. At a business lunch, she explains that she needs to leave it on because her job requires her to be “on call” at all times. During lunch, she admits that there is more to the story. Her job certainly requires that she stay in touch. But now, whether or not she is waiting for a message from work, she becomes anxious without her BlackBerry. “If I’m not in touch, I feel almost dizzy. As though something is wrong, something terrible is wrong.” The device has become a way to manage anxiety about her parents, her job, and her love life. Even if these don’t go quite right, she says, “if I have the BlackBerry in control, I feel that at least everything isn’t out of control.” But something has gotten out of control. When Robin thinks of stress, she thinks of being without her BlackBerry. But she admits that she thinks of being with her BlackBerry as well.
Robin says that her need for the BlackBerry began with business e-mail, but now she uses it to spend many hours a day on Facebook. She makes no pretense that this is about “business.” But Robin is no longer sure it is about pleasure. She describes being increasingly “annoyed” on Facebook. I ask her for an example—one of these moments of annoyance—and Robin begins to talk about her friend Joanne.
Robin and Joanne went to college together in Los Angeles. After graduating, Robin went to Chicago for a first job in publishing; Joanne stayed on the West Coast for graduate school in anthropology. Five years ago, Joanne’s dissertation research took her to a village in Thailand. Joanne had e-mail access during her year in the village, and she wrote Robin long, detailed e-mails, five or six pages each. There was a letter every two weeks—a personal journal of Joanne’s experience of Thai life. Robin describes them warmly—the letters were “elegant, detailed, poetic.” Robin printed out the cherished letters; on occasion she still rereads them. Now Joanne is back in Thailand on a new project, but this time, she posts a biweekly journal to her Facebook page. There has been no falling out between the two women; Joanne has simply chosen a more “efficient” way to get her story out to all her friends. Robin still gets an occasional e-mail. But essentially, what was once a personal letter has turned into a blog.
Robin says she is ashamed of her reaction to Joanne’s Facebook postings: “I was jealous of all of the other readers. They are not friends the way I am a friend.” Robin understands Joanne’s decision to “publish” her journal: “She is reaching more people this way. . . . Some can help in her career.” But despite herself, Robin feels abandoned. The all-friend postings do not make her feel close to her friend.
After she tells this story, essentially about a personal loss, Robin adds a postscript that she describes as “not personal. I’m trying to make a general point.” She says that when Joanne wrote her letters, they were “from a real person to another real person.” They were written to her, in all her particularity. Behind each letter was the history of their long friendship. The new letters on Facebook are generic. For a moment, Robin, the professional writer, allows herself a moment of judgment: “The journal is written to everyone and thus no one. It isn’t as good.” Robin misses receiving something that was just for her.
SPONTANEITYIn a discussion of online life among seniors at the Fillmore School, Brendan says he is lonely. He attempts humor, describing a typical day as “lost in translation”: “My life is about ‘I’ll send you a quick message, you send me another one in fifteen minutes, an hour, whatever. And then I’ll get back to you when I can.’” His humor fades. Texting depresses him. It doesn’t make him “feel close,” but he is certain that it takes him away from things that might. Brendan wants to see friends in person or have phone conversations in which they are not all rushing off to do something else. Here again, nostalgia circles around attention, commitment, and the aesthetic of doing one thing at a time. Truman, one of Brendan’s classmates, thinks his friend is asking too much. Truman says, “Brendan . . . calls me up sometimes, and it’s really fun, and I really enjoy it, but it’s something I can’t really imagine myself doing.... Well, it seems like an awkward situation to me, to call someone up just to talk.” Truman wants to indulge his friend, but he jokes that Brendan shouldn’t “bet on long telephone conversations anytime soon.” Truman’s remarks require some unpacking. He says he likes the telephone, but he doesn’t really. He says conversation is fun, but it’s mostly stressful. For Truman, anything other than “a set-up call, a call to make a plan, or tell a location” presumes you are calling someone who has time for you. He is never sure this is the case. So, he worries that this kind of call intrudes. It puts you on the line. You can get hurt.
When young people are insecure, they find ways to manufacture love tests—personal metrics to reassure themselves. These days I hear teenagers measuring degrees of caring by type of communication. An instant message puts you in one window among many. An extended telephone call or a letter—these rare and difficult things—demonstrates full attention. Brad, the Hadley senior taking a break from Facebook, says, “Getting a letter is so special because it is meant only for you. . . . It feels so complimentary, especially nowadays, with people multitasking more and more, for someone to actually go out of their way and give their full attention to something for your sake for five or ten minutes. What is flattering is that they take that amount of time ... that they’re actually giving up that time.”
Herb, part of the senior group at Fillmore feels similarly; he and his girlfriend have decided to correspond with letters: “The letter, like, she wrote it, she took her time writing it, and you know it came from her. The e-mail, it’s impersonal. Same with a text message, it’s impersonal. Anyone, by some chance, someone got her e-mail address, they could’ve sent it. The fact that you can touch it is really important.... E-mails get deleted, but letters get stored in a drawer. It’s real; it’s tangible. Online, you can’t touch the computer screen, but you can touch the letter.” His classmate Luis agrees: “There is something about sending a letter. You can use your handwriting. You can decorate a letter. Your handwriting can show where you are.” It comes out that he has never received a personal letter. He says, “
I miss those days even though I wasn’t alive.
” He goes on, a bit defensively because he fears that his fondness for handwriting might make him seem odd: “Before, you could just feel that way, it was part of the culture. Now, you have to feel like a throwback to something you really didn’t grow up with.”
I miss those days even though I wasn’t alive.
” He goes on, a bit defensively because he fears that his fondness for handwriting might make him seem odd: “Before, you could just feel that way, it was part of the culture. Now, you have to feel like a throwback to something you really didn’t grow up with.”
Brad says that digital life cheats people out of learning how to read a person’s face and “their nuances of feeling.” And it cheats people out of what he calls “passively being yourself.” It is a curious locution. I come to understand that he means it as shorthand for authenticity. It refers to who you are when you are not “trying,” not performing. It refers to who you are when you are in a simple conversation, unplanned. His classmate Miguel likes texting as a “place to hide,” but to feel close to someone, you need a more spontaneous medium:
A phone conversation is so personal because you don’t have time to sit there and think about what you’re going to say. What you have to say is just going to come out the way it’s meant to. If someone sends you a text message, you have a couple of minutes to think about what you’re going to say, whereas if you’re in a conversation, it’d be a little awkward if you didn’t say anything for two minutes, and then you came up with your answer.... That’s why I like calls. I’d rather have someone be honest with you. . . . If you call, you’re putting yourself out there, but it is also better.
At Fillmore, Grant says of when he used to text, “I end[ed] up feeling too lonely, just typing all day.” He has given it up, except for texting his girlfriend. He returns her long text messages with a “k,” short for “okay,” and then holds off on further communication until he can talk to her on the phone or see her in person. He says, “When someone sends you a text or IM, you don’t know
how
they’re saying something. They could say something to you, and they could be joking, but they could be serious and you’re not really sure.”
how
they’re saying something. They could say something to you, and they could be joking, but they could be serious and you’re not really sure.”
These young men are asking for time and touch, attention and immediacy. They imagine living with less conscious performance. They are curious about a world where people dealt in the tangible and did one thing at a time. This is ironic. For they belong to a generation that is known, and has been celebrated, for never doing one thing at a time.
Erik Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.
2
Psychiatrist Anthony Storr writes of solitude in much the same way. Storr says that in accounts of the creative process, “by far the greater number of new ideas occur during a state of reverie, intermediate between waking and sleeping.... It is a state of mind in which ideas and images are allowed to appear and take their course spontaneously . . . the creator need[s] to be able to be passive, to let things happen within the mind.”
3
In the digital life, stillness and solitude are hard to come by.
2
Psychiatrist Anthony Storr writes of solitude in much the same way. Storr says that in accounts of the creative process, “by far the greater number of new ideas occur during a state of reverie, intermediate between waking and sleeping.... It is a state of mind in which ideas and images are allowed to appear and take their course spontaneously . . . the creator need[s] to be able to be passive, to let things happen within the mind.”
3
In the digital life, stillness and solitude are hard to come by.
Online we are jarred by the din of the Internet bazaar. Roanne, sixteen, keeps her diary in a paper journal. She says she is too weak to stay focused when she has the Internet to tempt her:
I can’t use the Internet to write in my diary because at any moment I could watch
Desperate Housewives,
or even just a few minutes of it, or
Gossip Girl
or
Glee.
If you want to have an uninterrupted conversation, you might talk to somebody in person. If in person is not an option, then the phone. But there’s so many interruptions you can have if you’re sitting in front of a computer, because the computer has so many things you could be doing rather than talking to someone.
The physical world is not always a quiet place. There is performance and self-presentation everywhere—at school, in your family, on a date. But when young people describe days of composing and recomposing their digital personae, they accept the reality of this new social milieu, but also insist that online life presents a new kind of “craziness.” There are so many sites, games, and worlds. You have to remember the nuances of how you have presented yourself in different places. And, of course, texting demands your attention all the time. “You have no idea,” says an exhausted Brad.
THE PERILS OF PERFORMANCEBrad says, only half jokingly, that he worries about getting “confused” between what he “composes” for his online life and who he “really” is. Not yet confirmed in his identity, it makes him anxious to post things about himself that he doesn’t really know are true. It burdens him that the things he says online affect how people treat him in the real. People already relate to him based on things he has said on Facebook. Brad struggles to be more “himself” there, but this is hard. He says that even when he tries to be “honest” on Facebook, he cannot resist the temptation to use the site “to make the right impression.” On Facebook, he says, “I write for effect. I sit down and ask, ‘If I say this, will it make me sound like I’m too uptight? But if I say this, will it make me sound like I don’t care about anything?’” He makes an effort to be “more spontaneous on Facebook . . . to actively say, ‘This is who I am, this is what I like, this is what I don’t like,’” but he feels that Facebook “perverts” his efforts because self-revelation should be to “another person who cares.” For Brad, it loses meaning when it is broadcast as a profile.
The Internet can play a part in constructive identity play, although, as we have seen, it is not so easy to experiment when all rehearsals are archived. But Brad admits that on Facebook he only knows how to play to the crowd. We’ve seen that he anguishes about the cool bands and the bands that are not so cool. He thinks about the movies he should list as favorites and the ones that will pin him as boring or sexist. There is a chance that admitting he likes the Harry Potter series will be read positively—he’ll be seen as someone in touch with the whimsy of his childhood. But more likely, it will make him seem less sexy. Brad points out that in real life, people can see you are cool even if you like some uncool things. In a profile, there is no room for error. You are reduced to a series of right and wrong choices. “Online life,” he says, “is about premeditation.” Brad sums up his discontents with an old-fashioned word: online life inhibits “authenticity.” He wants to experience people directly. When he reads what someone says about themselves on Facebook, he feels that he is an audience to their performance of cool.
Brad has more than a little of Henry David Thoreau in him. In
Walden
, published in 1854, Thoreau remarks that we are too much in contact with others and in ways that are random. We cannot respect each other if we “stumble over one another.”
4
He says, we live “thick,” unable to acquire value for each other because there is not enough space between our times together. “Society,” writes Thoreau, “is commonly too cheap.”
5
It would be better, he says, to learn or experience something before we join in fellowship with others. We know what Thoreau did about his opinions. He took his distance. He found communion with nature and simple objects. He saw old friends and made new ones. All of these sustained him, but he did not live “thick.” In the end, Brad decides to leave his digital life for his own private Walden. When he wants to see a friend, he calls, makes a plan, and goes over to visit. He says that life is beginning to feel more natural. “Humans learn to talk and make eye contact before they learn to touch-type, so I think it’s a more basic, fundamental form of communication,” he says. Abandoning digital connection, he says, he is “sacrificing three hollow conversations” in favor of “one really nice social interaction with one person.” He acknowledges that “not doing IM reduces the amount of social interacting you can do in one day,” but doesn’t mourn the loss: “Would you rather have thirty kind-of somewhat-good friends or five really close friends?”
Walden
, published in 1854, Thoreau remarks that we are too much in contact with others and in ways that are random. We cannot respect each other if we “stumble over one another.”
4
He says, we live “thick,” unable to acquire value for each other because there is not enough space between our times together. “Society,” writes Thoreau, “is commonly too cheap.”
5
It would be better, he says, to learn or experience something before we join in fellowship with others. We know what Thoreau did about his opinions. He took his distance. He found communion with nature and simple objects. He saw old friends and made new ones. All of these sustained him, but he did not live “thick.” In the end, Brad decides to leave his digital life for his own private Walden. When he wants to see a friend, he calls, makes a plan, and goes over to visit. He says that life is beginning to feel more natural. “Humans learn to talk and make eye contact before they learn to touch-type, so I think it’s a more basic, fundamental form of communication,” he says. Abandoning digital connection, he says, he is “sacrificing three hollow conversations” in favor of “one really nice social interaction with one person.” He acknowledges that “not doing IM reduces the amount of social interacting you can do in one day,” but doesn’t mourn the loss: “Would you rather have thirty kind-of somewhat-good friends or five really close friends?”
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