THE NEW STATE OF THE SELF: TETHERED AND MARKED ABSENT
These days, being connected depends not on our distance from each other but from avail- able communications technology. Most of the time, we carry that technology with us. In fact, being alone can start to seem like a precondition for being together because it is easier to communicate if you can focus, without interruption, on your screen. In this new regime, a train station (like an airport, a café, or a park) is no longer a communal space but a place of social collection: people come together but do not speak to each other. Each is tethered to a mobile device and to the people and places to which that device serves as a portal. I grew up in Brooklyn where sidewalks had a special look. In every season—even in winter, when snow was scraped away—there were chalk-drawn hopscotch boxes. I speak with a colleague who lives in my old neighborhood. The hopscotch boxes are gone. The kids are out, but they are on their phones.
When people have phone conversations in public spaces, their sense of privacy is sustained by the presumption that those around them will treat them not only as anonymous but as if absent. On a recent train trip from Boston to New York, I sat next to a man talking to his girlfriend about his problems. Here is what I learned by trying not to listen: He’s had a recent bout of heavy drinking, and his father is no longer willing to supplement his income. He thinks his girlfriend spends too much money and he dislikes her teenage daughter.
Embarrassed, I walked up and down the aisles to find another seat, but the train was full. Resigned, I returned to my seat next to the complainer. There was some comfort in the fact that he was not complaining to me, but I did wish I could disappear. Perhaps there was no need. I was already being treated as though I were not there.
Or perhaps it makes more sense to think of things the other way around: it is those on the phone who mark themselves as absent. Sometimes people signal their departure by putting a phone to their ear, but it often happens in more subtle ways—there may be a glance down at a mobile device during dinner or a meeting. A “place” used to comprise a physical space and the people within it. What is a place if those who are physically present have their attention on the absent? At a café a block from my home, almost everyone is on a computer or smartphone as they drink their coffee. These people are not my friends, yet somehow I miss their presence.
Our new experience of place is apparent as we travel. Leaving home has always been a way to see one’s own culture anew. But what if, tethered, we bring our homes with us? The director of a program that places American students in Spanish universities once complained to me that her students were not “experiencing Spain.” They spent their free time on Facebook, chatting with their friends from home. I was sympathetic, thinking of the hours I had spent walking with my teenage daughter on a visit to Paris the summer after she first got her mobile phone. As we sat in a café, waiting for a friend to join us for dinner, Rebecca received a call from a schoolmate who asked her to lunch in Boston, six hours behind us in time. My daughter said simply, “Not possible, but how about Friday?” Her friend didn’t even know she was out of town. When I grew up, the idea of the “global village” was an abstraction. My daughter lives something concrete.
Emotionally, socially, wherever she goes, she never leaves home. I asked her if she wouldn’t rather experience Paris without continual reminders of Boston. (I left aside the matter that I was a reminder of Boston and she, mercifully, did not raise it.) She told me she was happy; she liked being in touch with her friends. She seemed to barely understand my question. I was wistful, worried that Rebecca was missing an experience I cherished in my youth: an undiluted Paris. My Paris came with the thrill of disconnection from everything I knew. My daughter’s Paris did not include this displacement.
When Rebecca and I returned home from France, I talked about the trip with a close friend, a psychoanalyst. Our discussion led her to reminisce about her first visit to Paris. She was sixteen, travelling with her parents. But while they went sightseeing with her younger brother, she insisted on staying in her hotel room, writing long letters to her boyfriend. Adolescents have always balanced connection and disconnection; we need to acknowledge the familiarity of our needs and the novelty of our circumstances. The Internet is more than old wine in new bottles; now we can always be elsewhere.
In the month after Rebecca and I returned from Paris, I noted how often I was with colleagues who were elsewhere as well: a board meeting where members rebelled when asked to turn off their mobile devices; a faculty meeting where attendees did their e-mail until it was their turn to speak; a conference at which audience members set up Internet back channels in order to chat about speakers’ presentations during the presentations themselves.
Since I teach in a university, I find examples of distracted academics of particular interest. But it is the more mundane examples of attention sharing that change the fabric of daily life. Parents check e-mail as they push strollers. Children and parents text during family dinners. As I watched the annual marathon in Florence, Italy, in November 2009, a runner passed me, texting. Of course, I tried to take her picture on my cell phone. After five years, my level of connectivity had finally caught up with my daughter’s. Now when I travel, my access to the Net stays constant. There is security and pleasure in a good hotel on the other side of the world, but it cannot compare to the constancy of online connections.
Research portrays Americans as increasingly insecure, isolated, and lonely. We work more hours than ever before, often at several jobs. Even high school and college students, during seasons of life when time should be most abundant, say that they don’t date but “hook up” because “who has the time?” We have moved away, often far away, from the communities of our birth. We struggle to raise children without the support of extended families. Many have left behind the religious and civic associations that once bound us together. To those who have lost a sense of physical connection, connectivity suggests that you make your own page, your own place. When you are there, you are by definition where you belong, among officially friended friends. To those who feel they have no time, connectivity, like robotics, tempts by proposing substitutions through which you can have companionship with convenience. A robot will always be there, amusing and compliant. On the Net, you can always find someone. “I never want to be far from my BlackBerry,” a colleague told me. “That is where my games are. That is where my sites are. Without it, I’m too anxious.”
Today, our machine dream is to be never alone but always in control. This can’t happen when one is face-to-face with a person. But it can be accomplished with a robot or, as we shall see, by slipping through the portals of a digital life.
Alone Together
