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April 9 - April 14, 2021
They are all paying less attention to where they are and the people they are with. “People forget . . . that sitting here right now might be the best thing that you can get. That might be the best you have.”
Finally, Oliver breaks the silence: “What if you’re always looking for something better and then you die? You’ve searched all the way until you’re dead. And you’ve never said, ‘Maybe I’ve found it.’” The group gets quiet again.
It is Randall’s effort to navigate the conversation’s quiet spaces. When he moves his friend’s image to the screen, he is ready for Facebook and a conversation he can manage.
In 1979 Susan Sontag wrote, “Today, everything exists to end in a photograph.” Today, does everything exist to end online? One thing seems clear: Time with friends becomes more comfortable when it produces images to be shared.
You ask them where they are. But you aren’t necessarily being vulnerable at the party. Because you’re removing yourself and showing that you are choosing to be on your phone. It isn’t that no one wants to talk to you. It’s that you’re choosing not to talk to anyone else because you’re on your phone.
Haley talked about Natalie’s consolation network and her consolation texts. Think of those online consolations as the first minutes of a conversation, the first things you might say to an unhappy friend. You provide support. You say you are sorry and how much you care for them. When you allow yourself to be consoled by a friend in person, you take the chance that things might go beyond this. There is more of a chance for the conversation to open out onto more delicate areas. If, as Natalie, you are talking about a relationship that has ended, you could find yourself talking details: how each
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Ignoring a text for me means a lot to me.”
This sense of urgency extends from bad news to good. You always want to know who is reaching out to you. Your phone is your view onto that. When a friend sends a text and says it is urgent, you will stop whatever you are doing and attend to your friend on the phone.
When friends are together, they fall into inattention and feel comfortable retreating into their own worlds. Apart, they are alert for emergencies. It is striking that this often reflects how they describe the behavior of their parents: When their children are not at home, they become hovering “helicopters”; when their children are in plain sight, parents give themselves permission to turn to their phones. This is our paradox. When we are apart: hypervigilance. When we are together: inattention.
“My students are so caught up in their phones that they don’t know how to pay attention to class or to themselves or to another person or to look in each other’s eyes and see what is going on.”
What children are sharing, of course, are tokens that they belong—a funny video, a joke, a photograph, the things that happen to be circulating that day. “It’s all about affiliation,” says one teacher. Another reflects: “It’s as though they spend their day in a circle exchanging charms for their charm bracelets. But it takes place in a circle where they never get time off.”
Smoke was coming out of my ears.” He asks Anna, “Why? Why would you do this?” Anna has an answer ready: “It was just on Facebook.” It is clear to Adams that Anna doesn’t see what she did as altogether real.
For Haley, it wasn’t just the phone “but the history on the phone. . . . When I texted someone I was so aware of the history the phone held. Every relationship was documented. And I carried the documentation—the texts and the email—with me all the time.”
This means it’s not a way to access Facebook. Haley says she feels lighter. She says her friendships feel “unencumbered by past history. I am able to be more forgiving.”
He thinks their conversations change when she is recording. And he doesn’t like the idea that if he says something off-putting, it won’t be enough to simply see the reaction in Andi’s face and say he is sorry. His wife will have the record forever. Perhaps she will never be able to forgive because she will never be able to forget.
Haley and Andi have opposite intuitions about what is important about memory. Haley is betting that everyone will want to power down. “I want people to live in the moment for friendship. Don’t come with your history or expectations. You should be able to start your relationship from where you are now.” Andi has the opposite feeling. She believes that having a record of her past will allow her to live more fully in the present.
Behind technological fantasies there is so often a deep sadness that human beings have simply not gotten it right and technology will help us do better.
I’m not optimistic about the empathy machine as a shortcut, or what one enthusiast describes to me as “training wheels for empathy.” Perhaps for some it makes sense as a supplement. But of course, with technology, we have a tendency to take what begins as a supplement and turn it into a way of life. Text messages weren’t meant to disrupt dinner table conversations, but this supplement to talk became a substitution.
Most dramatic to me is the study that found a 40 percent drop in empathy among college students in the past twenty years, as measured by standard psychological tests, a decline its authors suggested was due to students having less direct face-to-face contact with each other. We pay a price when we live our lives at a remove.
Since Socrates lamented the movement from speech to writing, observers have warned against each new mode of communication as destructive to a cherished mode of thought.
For Williams, the empathic relationship does not begin with “I know how you feel.” It begins with the realization that you don’t know how another feels. In that ignorance, you begin with an offer of conversation: “Tell me how you feel.” Empathy, for Williams, is an offer of accompaniment and commitment. And making the offer changes you. When you have a growing awareness of how much you don’t know about someone else, you begin to understand how much you don’t know about yourself. You learn, says Williams, “a more demanding kind of attention. You learn patience and a new skill and habit of
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When you give someone a thumbs-up or respond to a question posed on Instagram, these can be first steps in an empathic process. In the online exchange, you might be saying to someone else, “I want to hear you. I’m with you.” Like the consolation texts that Natalie receives, they are a beginning. Everything depends on what happens next.
Empathy is not merely about giving someone information or helping them find a support group. It’s about convincing another person that you are there for the duration. Empathy means staying long enough for someone to believe that you want to know how they feel, not that you want to tell them what you would do in their circumstance. Empathy requires time and emotional discipline.
The essayist William Deresiewicz said that as our communities have atrophied, we have moved from living in actual communities to making efforts to feel as though we are living in them. So, when we talk about communities now, we have moved “from a relationship to a feeling.” We have moved from being in a community to having a sense of community.
“The best stuff,” she says, “is friends making mistakes together. . . . If you’re talking you can mess up and it turns into something really funny. That’s how people bond. . . . It’s not like everything is made to be perfect.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has studied the “real” conversations of friendship. Some friendships, he says, are built around conversations that provide validation. He calls these “reinforcement friendships”: They accomplish “what everyone likes . . . reciprocal attention paid to one another’s ideas and idiosyncrasies.”
There are friends who question each other’s dreams and desires, who encourage each other to try out the new. “A true friend is someone we can occasionally be crazy with, someone who does not expect us to be always true to form. It is someone who shares our goal of self-realization, and therefore is willing to share the risks that any increase in complexity entails.”
“When I am at home, I don’t really get to sit down next to someone . . . and just talk with them. There are always other things going on, their phone is always out, they’re talking to other people.” For this young man, conversation itself seemed a revelation—a large, new space. He says, “It was a stream, very ongoing. It wouldn’t break apart.”
In 2008, eighteen-year-old Hannah tells me that in online flirting, “the hardest thing” is that the person you text has the option of simply not responding—that is, of responding with NOTHING, a conversational choice not really available in face-to-face talk. Her assessment of its effects: “It is a way of driving someone crazy. . . . You don’t exist.”
It is more like a conversation with someone who simply looks away as if they don’t understand that human beings need to be responded to when they speak. Online, we give ourselves permission to behave this way. And when it happens to you, the only way to react with dignity is to pretend it didn’t happen. Hannah describes the rules: If people don’t respond to you online, your job is to pretend to not notice.
In fact, in Hannah’s circle, the socially correct response to the NOTHING gambit is to get aggressively busy on social media—busy enough that your activity will be noticed by the person who has gone silent on you.
In the early days of texting, 2008–2010, I spoke with more than three hundred teens and young adults about their online lives. I saw a generation settle into a new way of dealing with silence from other people: namely, deny that it hurts and put aside your understanding that if you do it to others, it will hurt them as well. We tolerate that we are not being shown empathy. And then we tolerate that we don’t show it to others.
In this social environment, studies show a decline in the ability to form secure attachments—the kind where you trust and share your life. Ironically, our new efficient quests for romance are tied up in behavior that discourages empathy and intimacy. The preliminaries of traditional courtship, the dinner dates that emphasized patience and deference, did not necessarily lead to intimacy but provided practice in what intimacy requires. The new preliminaries—the presentation of candidates as if in a game—don’t offer that opportunity.
In this environment, we move from “Where are you?” (the technology-enhanced encounter) to “Who are you?” and then to “Wait, what just happened? Did I make you disappear?”
Technology encourages Liam to see his romantic life in terms of product placement. He is the product and he is direct marketing. You pass your photo through Photoshop and then others go photo shopping. But despite this ease of first contact, Liam does not have a girlfriend and is not optimistic about his prospects.
The psychologist Barry Schwartz popularized the notion of the “paradox of choice.” While we think we would be happiest if we had more choices, constrained choice often leads to a more satisfied life.
The psychologists David Myers and Robert Lane independently concluded that in American society today, abundance of choice (and this would apply to choices in products, career paths, or people) often leads to depression and feelings of loneliness.
So, the problem with infinite choice is that it makes us unhappy because we can’t bring ourselves to make any choice, and no choice feels definitive.
It’s a paradox of the medium: Online exchanges exist forever, but you imagine the ones that didn’t work out as not having happened at all.
But getting to know other people, appreciating them, is not necessarily a task enhanced by efficiency. This is because people don’t reveal themselves, deeply, in efficient ways. Things take time to unfold. There is need for backtracking and repetition. There is a deepening of understanding when you have gone through the same thing twice, or more.
Talking with Tessa, including and especially over text and email, could feel like sex. “In talking to Tessa, I would find myself crying literally tears of joy, I felt so understood and so, like, pushed and challenged in a loving way. And I felt empathized with, and she knew just how to mock me in the way that I mock myself and vice versa.”
Even before he met Tessa, he says, his texts were “crafted.” But once he was writing to Tessa, things moved beyond craft. Now Adam was compelled by something deeper. He was trying to be what Tessa needed: “a better self, a more empathic person, someone more able to share himself.” Adam says that Tessa used texting to help him be that person.
Adam is troubled by the gap between his in-person self and the self he can summon in online exchanges. But the Adam I have before me is a reflective, caring man. Online, we do not become different selves. Our online identities are facets of ourselves that usually are harder for us to express in the physical realm. This is why the online world can be a place for personal growth. People work on desired qualities in the virtual and gradually bring them into their lives “off the screen.” Adam is in the process of recognizing that, in person, he is closer to the online Adam than he sometimes
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I treasure that permanence. . . . When she writes . . . “you are great,” she is saying “I have a need and you met it.” How central that is to have that written evidence, for the rest of my life in my Gmail . . . or to print it out if I want, whenever.
I need to see who wants me. We are not as strong as technology’s pull. —A JUNIOR AT MIT, EXPLAINING WHY SHE CHECKS HER TEXTS DURING CLASS
My students became upset because, in this class, their usual split attention (looking at their phones; listening to their classmates) felt wrong. It devalued their classmates’ life stories (and their own) and made them feel that they were crossing some moral line. They could imagine a day when people around you would be upset and you would still be pulled away to your phone. A lot is at stake in attention. Where we put it is not only how we decide what we will learn; it is how we show what we value.
Oliver expects that what he has now is what he’ll have in the future. He imagines that from now on, when he feels bored, he will immediately add a new layer of communication. So for him, “boredom is a thing of the past.”
In classrooms, the distracted are a distraction: Studies show that when students are in class multitasking on laptops, everyone around them learns less. One college senior says, “I’ll be in a great lecture and look over and see someone shopping for shoes and think to myself, ‘Are you kidding me?’ So I get mad at them, but then I get mad at myself for being self-righteous. But after I’ve gone through my cycle of indignation to self-hate, I realize that I have missed a minute of the lecture, and then I’m really mad.”
But even for those who don’t get stirred up, when you see someone in your class on Facebook or checking their email, two things cross your mind: Maybe this class is boring, and maybe I, too, should attend to some online business.
Writers, artists, scientists, and literary scholars talk openly about disenabling the Wi-Fi on their computers in order to get creative work done. In the acknowledgments of her most recent book, the novelist Zadie Smith thanks Freedom and SelfControl, programs that shut off connectivity on her Mac.
