Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (9 page)

There are a lot of pretty bad things that the “online you” can do to the real you. Your emotional texts, sent without thinking in the heat of the moment, could become widespread. You could accidentally post an intimate photo taken for your eyes only. You could forward someone an e-mail without seeing that there’s something that person shouldn’t see at the bottom. You could mistakenly reveal someone’s big news before that person is ready to share it.

There was a time when, if you wore the wrong kind of clothes to middle school, at worst the only people who would notice would be the clique of mean girls at the cool-kids table. Now, the cool-kids table is everywhere.

The Nuanced but Important Difference Between “Private” and “Personal”

Before the Internet came along, we could categorize our information in three simple ways: public, private, or personal.

Public information is exactly what it sounds like. This is everything you’re totally cool with people knowing or having access to, or winding up on the front page of a newspaper.

Private information includes the things that you would only tell your lawyer, therapist, doctor, spouse, diary, or absolutely no one at all.

But then there’s personal information—the category in between, full of complicated nuance. This includes things you might tell your friends but you probably wouldn’t share with strangers.

I post family photos on Facebook all the time for my friends to see. I see photos of my friends’ kids, weddings, and families. None of these photos are private per se. It wouldn’t ruin anyone’s life if these cute, harmless photos wound up in the press. But these images are certainly personal, which means my friends trust me to behave appropriately when I see them.

It’s generally pretty easy to identify information as either public or private. But when it comes to personal information—that middle ground between something that’s okay to share slightly outside your immediate circle but not with absolutely everyone—you enter a bit of a gray zone.

Before the Internet arrived, the gray zone was there, but it was much smaller. You could be fairly certain that if you showed your vacation bikini pics to your friends, it didn’t mean your aunt and your aunt’s friends and some random guy you once went to high school with were also going to see, distribute, and comment on them. Your friends would understand the nuance and context of what they were seeing and know not to share personal material with the outside world. Sitting around the coffee table looking at your photo albums, you controlled the distribution of your information.

But online you don’t have that luxury. Online you have private and you have public, and the entire concept of personal information has vanished.

This causes problems.

I learned this lesson when some photos of my bachelorette party didn’t stay in Vegas like they were supposed to. The photos weren’t scandalous; it was just me and a few friends hanging out by the pool. I didn’t think twice about posting them on Facebook, but from there the photos found their way onto a Silicon Valley gossip blog, where I became the subject of some uncomfortable discussions.

It was embarrassing but not awful. Nobody was nude or inappropriate—just a bunch of girls having fun at a routine bachelorette party. Of course, I would have preferred that the photos not wind up on the broader web, but nobody cried about it. It didn’t ruin anyone’s life or career. To this day, I still don’t know who saw the photo album and spread it more widely. Hundreds of my friends managed to see the photos and categorize them appropriately as falling into the personal zone. But the moral of the story is that it takes only one friend who doesn’t understand or respect the difference for the personal zone to go away.

When personal information goes public, it’s really hard to know what to do about it. There are two schools of thought here. Some people feel that it’s okay to ask for the information to be taken down. But many more will argue that you should stay quiet and hope it doesn’t spread, that when you object to the publication of information you previously considered to be personal, it only adds fuel to the fire and your protest will, ironically, make it even more likely to be seen by more people. This is known online as the “Streisand effect,” named after a certain popular singer’s famously failed attempt to have a photograph of her private home removed from the Internet.

This whole situation needs to be fixed. It can’t be that we’re going to have to adjust to a world where we cannot share anything but our utmost public and sterile information. Sharing the personal stuff with others is an essential aspect of what it means to be human. If our online lives are to be as fulfilling as our offline ones, and if those two lives are to be fully integrated, then as we go forward we need to find a way to bring back personal information online. We must be able to post some pool pics without the whole world finding out, even if one of our friends is feeling a little overenthusiastic with the share button that day.

Did you ever wonder why, in movies about the Old West, despite how hot it must have been, the frontier folk wore a lot of heavy suits and always spoke in a kind of flowery, polite way? Why, in the middle of nowhere, would people care so much about how they spoke or whether their clothes were dashing?

I think this featured heavily in movie producers’ depictions of the era not just because it was fashionable but because that kind of behavior played an important role in maintaining order in a strange new environment. The Internet is the latest technological improvement bringing us into unfamiliar territory, and as with previous frontiers, we’re going to need to grasp something that our parents, our teachers, and our communities probably spent a great deal of time instilling in us as we grew up, something known simply, for lack of a better word, as etiquette.

Repost unto others as you would have them repost unto you.

It’s still the Wild West online, and we need new guidelines for the digital era. Even though so much about the way we communicate has changed, certain basic rules of decency and civility haven’t changed and, in fact, may be needed now more than ever.

As is the case with any technology or tool, it’s up to
people
to make the most out of the tech, to utilize it in a way that enhances their lives and relationships instead of detracts from them. Technology can make our lives more interesting, but it’s not going to solve all our problems, and as we’ve seen, it will probably even create a few.

It’s a common complaint that people are beginning to see the world only through the lenses of their camera phones, as if those screens were more “real.” At concerts, I’ve seen well-meaning souls watch an entire show play out on the shaky screens they’re holding above their heads, rather than the stage in front of them. I’ve seen people so busy Instagramming a moment that they miss truly experiencing it.

Keep in mind that an Internet with real identities and standard practices of behavior doesn’t have to be a boring place or a police state. It just needs to mirror how you’d behave in a similar situation offline. If you’re at your parents’ house for Thanksgiving, it’s generally inappropriate to down a row of tequila shots, slap your parents’ friend on the back, and yell, “Woooo! Spring break!” Of course, if you’re celebrating Thanksgiving in Cancún and crazy Uncle Al is in an especially “festive” spirit, then by all means woooo away. A call for mindfulness, compassion, and etiquette online, which mirrors the standards expected of us in civil society, is
not
a call for a woooo-free world. The point is that as our online lives have become inseparable from our offline lives, we need a set of rules, taboos, and guidelines that recognizes there are real people using their real identities on the other side of the screen.

Some things are cool on spring break that are not cool on Thanksgiving Day. There may be some awful places on the Internet, which don’t deserve a mention here. You may see some things you don’t want to see, things for which your retinas will never forgive you and that may be acceptable only in those contexts, within of course the bounds of legality. But that doesn’t mean there are no standards of behavior to be had
anywhere
online.

We have to get smarter not only about what we publish but also about what we, as the recipients of our friends’ information, do with potentially sensitive material posted by others.

Above all, you need to be careful who you choose as your friends, whether offline or online. As my Christmas Poke photo story shows, there’s no privacy or security setting in the world that can save you from a friend’s bad judgment.

We can be our real selves online and off. We don’t have to be afraid to share. It doesn’t have to be so complicated. And we can leverage technology in many positive ways to make a real and meaningful impact on the world.

We are truly the most empowered generation in history. Technology allows us to communicate, collaborate, and understand the world around us in ways unthinkable even a few years ago. With this new power, we can solve age-old problems and create new opportunities for everyone.

All you have to do is be yourself.

chapter 5

FRIENDS

Closer to Friends, Further from Friendship

T
he call was from a friend of a friend who had been introduced to me over e-mail by another friend of a friend who had not asked my permission before making the introduction. But I digress. This friend of a friend owned a business and was keen to pitch me the services his company could provide to our new production studio in Menlo Park.

I tried to be pleasant in my initial e-mail response, while also avoiding setting an exact time for a call, hoping I could weasel my way out of it. But a couple of days later, the e-mails started.

“HEY RANDI!!!” the first message began. “I’d LOVE to find some time to catch up tomorrow on the phone. I think we could do SO MUCH together.”

At the time, I was juggling a bunch of crazy deadlines on two huge client projects, traveling between New York and California, and trying to maintain my sanity. I had barely seen my own family let alone had the time for someone completely random. I wrote back and vaguely promised to get in touch soon.
Preferably after he fixes the caps lock key on his keyboard,
I thought.

“Sure thing!” he wrote back instantly. “How about the day after tomorrow?”

Oh boy.

Over the next couple of weeks, we traded a couple dozen e-mails. He was easily one of the most determined and oblivious people I had ever met. One thing you should know about me: I very rarely use my phone as a phone. I e-mail and text up a storm. I have hundreds of apps. But I’ll go weeks without checking my voice mail. (My voice-mail message even says not to bother leaving me a voice mail.) So, with that in mind, I really didn’t want to fit another call into my already jam-packed schedule, and I didn’t understand why he couldn’t just e-mail me his request. But he kept coming up with his relentless requests for a phone conversation, and eventually I caved and scheduled an early evening call.

At the appointed hour, the phone rang and I began to hear the pitch. I let him talk for about twenty minutes. The pitch was long-winded. Twenty minutes became thirty. The minutes kept ticking by. I was tired and needed to get home to relieve Asher’s sitter. Eventually I decided it was time to end it.

“Well,” I announced, “it was so good to talk—”

“Sure thing!” he interrupted. “But I wonder if we might continue the conversation in person? Can we meet tomorrow?”

Oh geez. Two dozen e-mails to get to a phone call, which had really just been a prelude to a meeting?

“I think we covered everything in detail, don’t you?” I replied.

“Ah, well, um . . .” he mumbled.

I made my farewells and hung up as forcefully as I could. Tapping the little red hang-up button is nowhere near as satisfying as hanging up used to be. I closed up the office. Everyone else had left for the evening. I made my way to the parking lot.

As I climbed into my car, I got a text from Brent. “Got home first! Asher was exhausted so I tucked him in already. No need to rush home.”

I remember sitting there for a moment in my car, in the empty parking lot, suddenly feeling sad and angry. A random person had taken nearly an hour of my day, and I had missed tucking my son in to bed that night.

Even as technology provides new ways to connect with the people who matter most to us, often it is the ones who matter less to us who are able to demand our attention.

The great thing about living in the future is that we’re constantly connected. And the bad thing is that we’re constantly connected. By making ourselves more accessible to the web, we’ve also made the web more accessible to us. Today there are dozens of ways of letting anyone with a smartphone know you tried to reach them. Most of the time this is convenient and empowering. But sometimes it’s also troubling and stressful. When your phone is constantly buzzing with notifications of all the e-mails, IMs, texts, Pokes, reshares, reblogs, and retweets from your entire social circle, it can be hard to focus on the people who are most important.

By putting ourselves online, we can be in touch with more people than ever before. But all that connectivity presents giant contradictions. Today, we live in a world where you can donate a kidney to somebody you’ve never met, through Facebook, but you can also sit next to someone at work for years and barely ever talk to them, communicating entirely through e-mail and instant message. You can keep in touch with every single person you went to high school with but then go home and spend “quality” time with your family with everyone glued to their laptops, tablets, and smartphones, entirely ignoring one another. We live in a world where you can Skype with someone thousands of miles away at the push of a button but you may need a dozen back-and-forth e-mails to schedule time to see a close friend.

And even though I love my phone and tablet, our shiny, beeping gadgets are now competing with our actual loved ones for attention.

Occasionally I’ll be in bed at night, trying to stealthily answer a few final e-mails on my phone, burying it under the blankets. Unfortunately, a bright, glowing rectangle clearly visible through the covers is a little hard to miss.

“Randi, getting a bit of Candy Crush in?” my husband whispers into the dark.

Guess I’m not very stealthy.

Our phones are demanding more and more of our time, and we’re giving in. But we’re not entirely to blame for this phenomenon. Studies have shown that checking your smartphone can be as addictive as using drugs. According to Dr. Peter Whybrow, a psychiatrist who runs the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, the smartphone is even a kind of “electronic cocaine.” Because our brains are wired to seek out novelty as a reward, all those constant updates and notifications you receive from your friends basically give you a little hit every time you tap “refresh.” As Dr. Whybrow said, “With technology, novelty is the reward. You essentially become addicted to novelty.”

When someone “likes” something you do, your brain receives a little burst of dopamine, a chemical that the brain produces to indicate a reward. That’s what makes our gadgets so addictive. Every time we get a notification, we’re hoping for another hit.

This is why during dinner, when the phone buzzes, we have to resist the urge to look at the screen, at least until our dining companion goes to the bathroom and is just out of sight. Or we find ourselves Instagramming our meals instead of just insta-eating the food and liking it the natural way. Sometimes it seems that brunch will never be enjoyed again without someone first hashtagging the hash browns.

Distracted dining has become so pervasive that some restaurants are trying to combat incessant mobile phone use by offering separate food photography time slots or providing a list of preapproved sample food photos with the menu.

That’s one way to deal with it. But maybe there’s a better way.

There’s a lot of talk these days about work–life balance, about managing career and family, about how to “have it all.” But this discussion is really more about achieving a
tech–
life balance. It doesn’t matter what time you leave the office if your head is buried in your computer as soon as you get home. It doesn’t matter that you can instantly e-mail people around the world if you haven’t had a face-to-face conversation with the ones right next to you in weeks. It’s wonderful to have dinner with friends, but are you really in the moment if everyone is texting at the table? If you don’t take the time to invest in the “life” part, then finding balance will always be a fiction. You need to have an “all” in order to “have it all.”

You need control over your devices instead of letting them control you. Technology is a tool, and whether it creates order or chaos in your life depends on how you use it. The technology itself is neutral. It’s up to you to use it in a way that
enhances
your life and doesn’t detract from it.

As technology becomes more advanced, the effect of technology on our personal lives grows every day, and the need to solve these challenges becomes ever more urgent. Smartphones are already challenging our ability to live in the moment, but soon we’ll have even more incentives to retreat into our digital cocoons.

Google Glass is the latest sensation geeks are swooning over. Glass is a pair of spectacles that sits on your head, and one of the lenses projects a small display directly into your eye that can show you anything on the Internet, from YouTube videos to Wikipedia articles to porn. It can also take photos and record videos of anything you’re looking at and post them straight to your social networks. Basically, it’s a smartphone on your head, with limitless access to information.

It’s an amazing innovation, but it also presents major challenges. What does it mean for human relationships if eye contact, the one remaining sign that someone is interested in what you’re saying, is no longer an indication that a person is paying attention?

My whole life as a young girl, I dreamed of having a big wedding and celebrating with hundreds of people all around me. But after spending years working at Facebook, documenting every moment of my life on social media and keeping in touch with thousands of people every day, something changed. When it actually came time to plan my wedding, I found that I craved something very different from my original childhood dream. I craved intimacy. I didn’t care about that three-hundred-person wedding anymore. I didn’t need to use my wedding as an excuse to see people from back in high school and college, because I already knew every detail about those people’s lives, thanks to Facebook.

In late May 2008, I traveled to Jamaica and celebrated my marriage to Brent with a small gathering of my closest friends and family. I wanted real quality time with the people who mattered most to me, and I wanted the most rare and precious gift of all from those people: their attention.

That’s what I got. And it was the greatest moment of my life. We spent three fun-filled days on the beach with our closest friends and family. I had meaningful conversations with every single one of our guests. I had the undivided attention of all the people I loved and cared about. And the wonderful man of my dreams—the one who had encouraged me to join Facebook and follow my passions, the one who had eventually followed me out to California to support my career, the one who was always there for me no matter what—was now my husband.

Attention as Currency

In this new online world, our attention comes at a premium.

Before the age of mobile devices and insta-connectivity, if someone was talking to you it would have been considered terrible manners to pick up a newspaper and start
reading
in the middle of the conversation, or call up old high school acquaintances to see what their babies were up to. But now, thanks to the smartphone, things like that happen all the time.

The IM dings in the middle of work, the text message buzzes in your pocket during a movie, the phone call comes in while you’re driving, and you check Facebook while you’re visiting Grandma. You can be talking to someone, anyone, and your attention will inevitably start to drift as soon as the phone beeps or buzzes, or fails to beep or buzz for what seems like too long.

The course of a day can feel like a competition for our attention, or the attention of others. Smartphones and social media have done much for our lives in recent years, but they’ve also seemingly taken away our ability to be truly
present
in any single moment. It’s now become socially acceptable to not give a hundred percent of your attention to whomever you’re meeting or speaking with.

A 2013 study by researchers at the Injury Prevention Center at the University of Washington found that nearly one-third of the 1,102 people they watched cross the street at twenty “high-risk” intersections were also on their phones talking, texting, or listening to music. Remember when your mom told you to look both ways before crossing the street? Now you also have to remember to look up.

Similarly, you could be
physically
at work, but if you’re checking your social media accounts all day, you’re not giving your employers what they’re really paying you for: your full attention. (Unless of course, you work for Facebook. In which case, it’s awkward if you’re not on Facebook all day.)

Your presence is no longer a sign that you’re actually paying attention. So, “attention” is something that today is more important than presence or location. In fact, attention is so valuable that it is a kind of social currency. When a random acquaintance sends you a dozen long-winded e-mails asking for an unnecessary phone call, that person is making a massive withdrawal from your attention bank. When you spend quality time with a friend while you’re not being distracted by your phone or e-mail, you’re investing attention in your relationship and making a big deposit into that person’s account. Your attention is a limited and highly valuable resource that you should spend how
you
feel is most important, whether with your friends, your family, your work, or yourself.

Of course, none of this should be understood as a way of
literally
monetizing what are essentially human emotions. You shouldn’t look at your kids and say, “No time to talk. Don’t you know how
valuable
Mommy’s time is?” That would probably give them a weird complex. You can’t exchange units of attention like currency, and in a sense, even though some people may seem to not be “worth” your time, that doesn’t mean you can ignore everyone who isn’t “time-valuable,” since that sort of makes you a jerk.