The Winter of Our Disconnect (27 page)

When Zuckerberg trialed News Feed, early subscribers freaked out. But after a few days the tide of protest subsided. Within a few weeks it had given way to a landslide of support, and subscribers. Through the magic of News Feed, Facebook users could now enjoy minute-by-minute updates detailing the most trivial details of their friends’ deeply humdrum lives—a gossip column, if you will, for nobodies.

The microblogging site Twitter, as even the least assimilated Digital Immigrant must by now be aware, works in much the same way, via posts—i.e., text messages—of not more than 140 words that answer the question, “What are you doing right now?” Powerful Twitterers—celebrities, politicians, and journalists in the main—who lead more tweet-worthy lives, use the site to broadcast everything from red-carpet gossip to fun-sized musings on foreign policy. The world’s top Twits command millions of followers, and the Twitterverse is—as they say in the classics—expanding. Digital Immigrants who demand to know what’s the point of Twitter (as so many of us do) simply show their age-slash-cluelessness. Often, there is no point, at least not in the Gutenbergian sense that communication is about the useful exchange of information. (In this respect, the term “social utility” is almost hilariously inaccurate.) Twitter describes itself as a “global cocktail party thrown by regular people.” Does a party have a point? For that matter, does a cocktail party with no alcohol? But I digress.

Thompson and other observers argue that what social media such as Facebook and Twitter deliver is simply contact itself—“ambient intimacy” or “ambient awareness.” Explains Thompson, “Each little update—each individual bit of social information—is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait ... like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.”
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It’s not friendship exactly, Thompson concedes. It’s more like artwork. Reading over my own sadly neglected Facebook page, it seems closer to a really crappy craft activity. Less pointillist painting than pipe cleaners on an empty egg carton.

The emerging etiquette of “friend requests” suggests there are plenty of nuances yet to be explored. Parents friending their own kids, for example—a practice Bill describes to me as “disturbed and barbaric.” Barbaric? “In the same sense as the live sheep trade is barbaric,” he explains. “Because it causes pointless suffering.”

Sussy agrees, and Anni does too, largely. Before The Experiment, she and I became “friends,” but I was careful to respect the boundaries. (No gratuitous photo-commenting, no hectoring wall posts, no snide comments about Farmville.) Yet the stigma seems to skip a generation. When I created a Facebook account for my mother and sent friend requests to her grandchildren, all six accepted immediately. “Does it bother you that Grammy checks out your photo albums?” I asked Sussy.

“I am semi-freaking out,” she admitted.

But I guess that’s what families are all about, right?

When Bill “added” his favorite teacher last year, it was my turn to semi-freak out. But a study reported in
Psychology Today
of university-based Facebook users found that academics who disclosed information about their social lives on their profiles created a more comfortable classroom climate and increased student motivation.
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Yeah, but to do what? On the other hand, a third of students surveyed believed their teachers should not be permitted access to Facebook at all, citing privacy and “identity management” concerns.

An article I came across in a law journal examines the advisability or otherwise of legal professionals friending witnesses.
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The Wall Street Journal
reports that U.S. tax agents have joined in the fun as well, using social networks to friend and apprehend suspected tax cheats.
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The tendency of networking media to redraw traditional social boundaries—whether between generations, or school cliques, or authority figures and subordinates—is part of the attraction. We are all equal in the eyes of Facebook, or among those whom we tweet. Or so, at least, runs the mythology.

“Twitter is all about stalking celebrities,” Sussy informs me confidently during month four. “It’s like, you add them and then you know everything they do.” She doesn’t have an account yet, of course. Weirdly enough, I was the one who explained to her what Twitter was. But in the weeks since we embarked on The Experiment, the microblogging site has exploded onto the new media scene like a rotten egg dropped from a high window, and she’s been gathering intelligence about it from her girlfriends. When I tell her that many celebrities’ tweets are ghosted by staffers, she rolls her eyes. “That is sooo something you would say, Mum,” she tells me. No arguments there. She tosses her head in irritation, as if my words were blowflies. But I can see from the look on her face that she’s thinking about it.

Social media cost employers $2,700 a year per worker in lost productivity, according to one recent survey.
²³
If they could put a price on parents’ lost sleep, we’d have to declare national bankruptcy.

Parents angst about their kids’ media use generally. But studies show our parental paranoia peaks around social media. That’s understandable, given the interactive nature of the beast. We are all too aware of the risks—especially those posed by cyber-bullying and online predators. Yet most of the time we feel pretty powerless to do anything about it.

One recent study found that 71 percent of parents speak with their kids about online safety, but only half that many impose controls. (N.B.: Speaking of controls, the research was sponsored by an Internet filter manufacturer!) Lord knows, cyber-shit happens. In the case of online bullying, pretty much constantly, in fact. In Canada, the United States, and Great Britain, a third to one half of teens report being victims of targeted online abuse by peers. A study of four thousand children aged twelve to eighteen published by the Cyberbullying Research Center in 2010 found 20 percent admitted to having been repeatedly harassed, mistreated, or ridiculed by another person online or while using cell phones. “Mean or hurtful comments” and rumor mongering were the most common forms of abuse.
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Australia purportedly has a much lower incidence. A government-commissioned report issued in September 2009 found fewer than 10 percent of kids aged ten to fourteen had been bullied online or via a cell phone, ranging upward to 20 percent of sixteen- to seventeen-year-olds.

Not surprisingly, victims of cyber-stalking are rarer still. Regarding other forms of inappropriate use, Australian experts estimate that 84 percent of boys and 60 percent of girls have been “accidentally exposed” to pornography online—curious that the boys have so many more “accidents”!—while 38 percent and 2 percent, respectively, have been deliberately exposed.
²⁵

Without underplaying these risks, the truth is that out-and-out abuse is probably the least of our problems as parents of Digital Natives. It’s a bit like our overblown stranger-danger fears, when statistics show very clearly that family friends and relatives pose by far the greatest risk for sexual, emotional, and physical abuse of our children. Or, for that matter, like our fear of flying versus our lack of fear of driving home from a party. We tend to badly misperceive where the real dangers lie: in the mundane and familiar environments that surround us. Their very familiarity means we look through, not at, them. And therein lies the risk.

Consider for a moment the visual element of social media, which, as the name “Facebook” suggests, is pretty much the point of the exercise, especially as far as teens are concerned. Five hundred, seven hundred, even a thousand photos on an individual account are nothing unusual. On Flickr, aka “the World’s Photo Album,” more than thirty-five million users have uploaded more than three billion digital snaps, and more are added at the rate of three million every day.
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One can’t help but wonder: If a picture is worth a thousand words—how do we begin to do an audit on three billion?

For my money, what’s really scary about all those social media photo ops isn’t the remote possibility that some pedophiles or predators may be stalking our children. It’s the absolute certainty that our kids will stalk one another—for hours and hours and hours on end, through an endless labyrinth of fake tan, rippling abs, and plumped-up lips. It is all innocent enough. Narcissism, as we know, is what teens
do
. But that’s exactly the point. It’s the intersection between what comes naturally (obsessing over image) and what the technology does best (producing and broadcasting those images to the world) that makes it risky business. Personally, I am more afraid of a Year 8 girl who Photoshops her digital snaps to create “flawless features” than I am of almost anything.

As the great moral philosopher Pogo the Possum once remarked, “We have seen the enemy. And he is us.” Then again, in a world where 44 percent of Internet users have an online identity different from their identity in real life, that’s arguably more complicated than it sounds.

 

 

At the University of Maryland, student athletes were sick of getting busted by their coaches, who have learned to stalk Facebook for incriminating photographic evidence of pre-game carousing. By September 2008, the situation had gotten so bad that students were actually trying to ban camera phones from their own events. Zeynep Tufekci, who teaches sociology to those students, is convinced that social-networking media are making us more, not less, accountable for our actions. “We’re going back to a more normal place, historically,” she observes—a place not unlike a small town, where everybody knows your business, whether you want them to or not. Identity theft is no longer the issue, Tufekci argues—but preserving anonymity may well be. “You know that old cartoon? On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog? On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog. If you don’t want people to know you’re a dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”
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Other observers worry that our meaningful relationships are being nudged aside by one-sided “parasocial” connections, such as Sussy’s relationship with Taylor Swift or Zooey Deschanel: “peripheral people in our network whose intimate details we follow closely online, even while they ... are basically unaware we exist,” in the words of Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard’s Berman Center for Internet and Society.
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Social media have enabled an explosion of what anthropologists call “weak ties.” But wither the strong ones? The deep ones?

And speaking of getting real, Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake—and no, I am not making that up—admitted recently that the ease of online sharing has made her slack about getting together with friends the old-fashioned way, in high-resolution reality. “These technologies allow you to be much more broadly friendly, but you just spread yourself much more thinly over many more people,” she explained.
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And who wants to raise a stack of pancake people? My worst fear as a parent was that my kids might lose an alternative frame of reference—that growing up as Digital Natives, they would swallow the pancake paradigm whole and forget there were more nourishing ways for friends and family to connect.

The evening Sussy and I hunkered down in front of the fire with the boxes of family photos (“Whoa. Look at all those hard copies!” she cried) for a veritable festival of face-to-Facebooking was a good case in point. We devoured thousands of images, laughing, hooting, or blinking in wonderment just as we would have done online. But sitting side by side, passing pictures from one set of hands to another, created a different energy. We didn’t simply consume the images, or allow them to consume us. Rather, they became catapults, triggers for stories and recollections, for the exchange of family and cultural history far greater than the sum of the individual parts. “Yes, darling, Grammy
was
a hottie back in sixty-nine,” I agreed, my eyes bright with unshed tears. “No, I’m pretty sure that
was
her real hair.”

The impromptu glee club I encountered that summer night around the piano evoked similar longings: more than a nostalgia for the real, it was a déjà vu about the real, I reflected, as the playlist skidded freakily from
The Jungle Book
to Death Cab for Cutie and back again. “I had no idea Mason Reeves could play the piano!” I exclaimed to Anni after the group dispersed that night. “To be honest, neither did I,” she admitted.

“Was it okay? I mean, you all looked like you were having fun . . .” I trailed off.

“Fun?” she spat back. “You must be joking! It was awesome.”

As we’ve already observed, Bill’s exile from MSN, Facebook, and his anime stash propelled him out of the door faster than a bullet from one of his beloved first-person shooter games. My dread was that he would simply make a beeline for The Beast, hunkered down at Vinny’s only a few streets away. And he did too—at first. Within a week or two, his separation anxiety seemed to dissipate. He started spending more time at the beach and pool, catching up with friends he hadn’t connected with since primary school. Matt, for instance, who was now a serious trumpet player, and Tom, the older brother of Bill’s gaming buddy Pat, who had recently taken up jazz piano. They were both studying with the same teacher, a saxophonist named Paul Andrews, Bill reported. And so began the prelude to his renewed interest in the saxophone. Any chance that he could start lessons again? he asked me soon afterward.

I pretended to consider it—no sense ruining everything by showing my approval—and agreed to a “trial lesson.” I came in at the end of it, just in time to see Andrews nod his head curtly.

“So, tell me. What do you want to be?”

“A musician,” Bill replied without hesitation.

(“WTF?” I was screaming internally.)

“Uh huh.” Andrews nodded again. “Well, practice, focus, listen, learn . . . and you can be.”