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When we talk online, we talk about a whole bunch of stuff, but when I’m on the phone with a boy or in person, it’s like “Ahh, mad awkward!” . . . Let’s say you are both together face-to-face. Unless you come up with some kind of question or something, like if you say, “How was school?” or whatever, you’ve got nothing. And let’s say he says, “Good,” or “Fine” . . . You’ve still got nothing.
The phone call is in real time and she sees real time as a place of awkwardness. Again, relaxation comes from fast response time with the possibility of editing. The phone is not a safe place to “just kind of put yourself together with somebody to see what your feelings are.”
When you have your phone, maybe it’s not just the people in front of you who lose priority. Does the world in front of you lose priority? Does the place you are in lose priority? Your phone reminds you, all the time, that you could be in so many different places.
At any party, her friends are texting friends at other parties to figure out “whether we are at the right party.” Kati says, “Maybe we can find a better party. Maybe there are better people at a party just down the block.”
Fear of Missing Out—now
As the term caught on, it came to capture the widespread anxiety about what to do and where to go now that so many options are apparent to you.
These days, as social media let us all track our friends’ homes, jobs, lovers, children, spouses, divorces, and vacations, we are tempted to measure ourselves—every day—against what other people are doing.
Wherever she and her friends are, they strategize about where they could be.
Nothing Kati and her friends decide seems to measure up to their fantasy of what they might have done.
Instead of talking to who we are with, we are on our phones, checking out other parties, asking what’s happening at other parties, trying to figure out if we should be there. You end up not talking to your friends because you’re on your phone, getting information about whether you should be someplace else altogether.
“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.
A good friend should keep you off your phone when you are together.
“Sending an email is so much easier because you get to think about everything, you get to write it down. . . . There are just so many variables on the phone or in an in-person conversation.”
The fact that he can answer emails and texts when he wants gives him the feeling that the world is there for him, when he wants it. And a telephone call makes it hard to do more than one thing at a time.
“It all goes too fast on the phone. I can’t imagine the person’s face. I can’t keep up. You have to be listening and responding in real time. . . . You have to be listening to the emotion in a person’s voice.”
Out of college and graduate school, new recruits will use the word “talk” to refer to an email exchange. Very few will use the phone unless specifically instructed to do
“With my friends, it’s either no conversation, or conversation about what’s on your phone.”
I’m aware that if I don’t have my phone to tell me what is going on, I would feel like a person without anything to say.”
There is another way to think about conversation, one that is less about information and more about creating a space to be explored. You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things—his or her opinions and associations.
“whole person conversation”—if things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don’t look away or text another friend.
In 1979 Susan Sontag wrote, “Today, everything exists to end in a photograph.”
Time with friends becomes more comfortable when it produces images to be shared.
So we never have to be truly alone in any situation. You get to a party and text your friend that you are at a party and don’t know anyone. 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.
striking up a conversation with strangers would go against the norm. And besides, it takes so much work. The phone gives her an easy way to stay in touch with her private social world.
“natural evolution”—we will get better at multitasked conversation. We will become better at picking up where conversations left off. Others think that the evolution will be in social expectations. We will come to experience people in the room and “people on the phone” as equally present.
In person, we have to wait seven minutes in order to see where a conversation is going. But if it is acceptable to answer a text during a conversation with a friend, we have an excuse to not even try to put in those seven minutes. And then, once we are on the phone, we can get more of what we have become accustomed to: the validation that texts can provide, along with the fact that they come in great numbers.
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.
you could find yourself talking details: how each party in the relationship might have contributed to its demise. How the other person might be feeling.
the existence of mobile phones has invented a new kind of privileged conversation. These are conversations with friends that are elevated when both participants know they are getting text messages and both choose to ignore their phones.
Intellectually, I know that it’s the people on the phone who keep me company. So when I go to check my messages, I am technically going to check for which people reached out to me. But let’s say I see there are no new messages. Then I just start to check things—Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, the familiar places to me. Now, it’s just the phone that is a comfort. The phone that is the friend.
being a friend means being “on call”—tethered to your phone, ready to be attentive, online.
This is our paradox. When we are apart: hypervigilance. When we are together: inattention.
friendships have moved from an emotional to an instrumental register. Friendships seem based on what students think someone else can do for them.
A friendship based on “Who has my back?” is the shadow of friendship, just as time alone with a phone is the shadow of solitude. Both provide substitutions that make you think you have what you don’t.
feel that these kids have a sense that friendships are one-sided. It is a place for them to broadcast. It is not a place for them to listen.
Facebook gave her a way to think about other people as objects that can’t be hurt. And a way to think about a kind of cruelty that doesn’t count.
online we are tempted to behave in ways that part of us knows will hurt others, but we seem to stop caring.
It is an environment that fosters bullying and casual cruelty.
We’ll go further in reclaiming conversation if we create environments that support conversation.
We no longer expect friends to show up and may not want them to. It starts to feel like too much emotional work.
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.
We have moved from being in a community to having a sense of community. Have we moved from empathy to a sense of empathy? From friendship to a sense of friendship?
Some friendships, he says, are built around conversations that provide validation. He calls these “reinforcement friendships”:
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.
When someone hits you with a no-response, you meet silence with silence.
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.
We tolerate that we are not being shown empathy. And then we tolerate that we don’t show it to others.
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.”
People feel that digital media put them in a comfort zone where they can share “just the right amount” of themselves. This is the Goldilocks effect.
When two people are continually connected, over time, it is almost impossible to maintain any “just right” distance. So the Goldilocks effect is really the Goldilocks fallacy.
