Always on
Pia Lindman walked the halls of MIT with cyborg dreams. She was not the first. In the summer of 1996, I met with seven young researchers at the MIT Media Lab who carried computers and radio transmitters in their back-packs and keyboards in their pockets. Digital displays were clipped onto eyeglass frames. Thus provisioned, they called themselves “cyborgs” and were always wirelessly connected to the Internet, always online, free from desks and cables. The group was about to release three new ’borgs into the world, three more who would live simultaneously in the physical and virtual. I felt moved by the cyborgs as I had been by Lindman: I saw a bravery, a willingness to sacrifice for a vision of being one with technology. When their burdensome technology cut into their skin, causing lesions and then scars, the cyborgs learned to be indifferent. When their encumbrances caused them to be taken as physically disabled, they learned to be patient and provide explanations.
At MIT, there was much talk about what the cyborgs were trying to accomplish. Faculty supporters stressed how continual connectivity could increase productivity and memory. The cyborgs, it was said, might seem exotic, but this technology should inspire no fear. It was “just a tool” for being better prepared and organized in an increasingly complex information environment. The brain needed help.
From the cyborgs, however, I heard another story. They felt like new selves. One, in his mid-twenties, said he had “become” his device. Shy, with a memory that seemed limited by anxiety, he felt better able to function when he could literally be “looking up” previous encounters with someone as he began a new conversation. “With it,” he said, referring to his collection of connectivity devices, “it’s not just that I remember people or know more. I feel invincible, sociable, better prepared. I am naked without it. With it, I’m a better person.” But with a sense of enhancement came feelings of diffusion. The cyborgs were a new kind of nomad, wandering in and out of the physical real. For the physical real was only one of the many things in their field of vision. Even in the mid-1990s, as they walked around Kendall Square in Cambridge, the cyborgs could not only search the Web but had mobile e-mail, instant messaging, and remote access to desktop computing. The multiplicity of worlds before them set them apart: they could be with you, but they were always somewhere else as well.
Within a decade, what had seemed alien was close to becoming everyone’s way of life, as compact smartphones replaced the cyborgs’ more elaborate accoutrements. This is the ex- perience of living full-time on the Net, newly free in some ways, newly yoked in others. We are all cyborgs now.
People love their new technologies of connection. They have made parents and children feel more secure and have revolutionized business, education, scholarship, and medicine. It is no accident that corporate America has chosen to name cell phones after candies and ice cream flavors: chocolate, strawberry, vanilla. There is a sweetness to them. They have changed how we date and how we travel. The global reach of connectivity can make the most isolated outpost into a center of learning and economic activity. The word “apps” summons the pleasure of tasks accomplished on mobile devices, some of which, only recently, we would not have dreamed possible (for me, personally, it is an iPhone app that can “listen” to a song, identify it, and cue it up for purchase).
Beyond all of this, connectivity offers new possibilities for experimenting with identity and, particularly in adolescence, the sense of a free space, what Erik Erikson called the moratorium. This is a time, relatively consequence free, for doing what adolescents need to do: fall in and out of love with people and ideas. Real life does not always provide this kind of space, but the Internet does.
No handle cranks, no gear turns to move us from one stage of life to another. We don’t get all developmental tasks done at age-appropriate times—or even necessarily get them done at all. We move on and use the materials we have to do the best we can at each point in our lives. We rework unresolved issues and seek out missed experiences. The Internet provides new spaces in which we can do this, no matter how imperfectly, throughout our lives. So, adults as well as adolescents use it to explore identity.
When part of your life is lived in virtual places—it can be Second Life, a computer game, a social networking site—a vexed relationship develops between what is true and what is “true here,” true in simulation. In games where we expect to play an avatar, we end up being ourselves in the most revealing ways; on social-networking sites such as Facebook, we think we will be presenting ourselves, but our profile ends up as somebody else—often the fantasy of who we want to be. Distinctions blur. Virtual places offer connection with uncertain claims to commitment. We don’t count on cyberfriends to come by if we are ill, to celebrate our children’s successes, or help us mourn the death of our parents. People know this, and yet the emotional charge on cyberspace is high. People talk about digital life as the “place for hope,” the place where something new will come to them. In the past, one waited for the sound of the post—by carriage, by foot, by truck. Now, when there is a lull, we check our e-mail, texts, and messages.
The story of my own hesitant steps toward a cyborg life is banal, an example of the near universality of what was so recently exotic. I carry a mobile device with me at all times. I held out for years. I don’t like attempting to speak to people who are moving in and out of contact as they pass through tunnels, come to dangerous intersections, or otherwise approach dead zones. I worry about them. The clarity and fidelity of sound on my landline telephone seems to me a technical advance over what I can hear on my mobile. And I don’t like the feeling of always being on call. But now, with a daughter studying abroad who expects to reach me when she wants to reach me, I am grateful to be tethered to her through the Net. In deference to a generation that sees my phone calls as constraining because they take place in real time and are not suitable for multitasking, I text. Awkwardly.
But even these small things allow me to identify with the cyborgs’ claims of an enhanced experience. Tethered to the Internet, the cyborgs felt like more than they could be without it. Like most people, I experience a pint-sized version of such pleasures. I like to look at the list of “favorites” on my iPhone contact list and see everyone I cherish. Each is just a tap away. If someone doesn’t have time to talk to me, I can text a greeting, and they will know I am think- ing of them, caring about them. Looking over recent text exchanges with my friends and family reliably puts me in a good mood. I keep all the texts my daughter sent me during her last year of high school. They always warm me: “Forgot my green sweater, bring please.” “Can you pick me up at boathouse, 6?” “Please tell nurse I’m sick. Class boring. Want to come home.” And of course, there are the photos, so many photos on my phone, more photos than I would ever take with a camera, always with me.
Yet, even such simple pleasures bring compulsions that take me by surprise. I check my e-mail first thing in the morning and before going to bed at night. I have come to learn that informing myself about new professional problems and demands is not a good way to start or end my day, but my practice unhappily continues. I admitted my ongoing irritation with myself to a friend, a woman in her seventies who has meditated on a biblical reading every morning since she was in her teens. She confessed that it is ever more difficult to begin her spiritual exercises before she checks her e-mail; the discipline to defer opening her inbox is now part of her devotional gesture. And she, too, invites insomnia by checking her e-mail every night before turning in.
Nurturance was the killer app for robotics. Tending the robots incited our engagement. There is a parallel for the networked life. Always on and (now) always with us, we tend the Net, and the Net teaches us to need it.
Online, like MIT’s cyborgs, we feel enhanced; there is a parallel with the robotic moment of more. But in both cases, moments of more may leave us with lives of less. Robotics and connectivity call each other up in tentative symbiosis, parallel pathways to relational retreat. With sociable robots we are alone but receive the signals that tell us we are together. Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be ac- cessed—and only for the parts we find useful, comforting, or amusing.
Once we remove ourselves from the flow of physical, messy, untidy life—and both robotics and networked life do that—we become less willing to get out there and take a chance. A song that became popular on You Tube in 2010, “Do You Want to Date My Avatar?” ends with the lyrics “And if you think I’m not the one, log off, log off and we’ll be done.”
Our attraction to even the prospect of sociable robots affords a new view of our networked life. In Part One we saw that when children grow up with fond feelings for sociable robots, they are prepared for the “relationships with less” that the network provides. Now I turn to how the network prepares us for the “relationships with less” that robots provide. These are the unsettling isolations of the tethered self. I have said that tethered to the network through our mo- bile devices, we approach a new state of the self, itself. For a start, it presumes certain entitle- ments: It can absent itself from its physical surround—including the people in it. It can experience the physical and virtual in near simultaneity. And it is able to make more time by multi- tasking, our twenty-first-century alchemy.
