The Winter of Our Disconnect

by Susan Maushart

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.26 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.”27

  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.28 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.29

  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.”

  Up to that point, Bill had barely picked up his instrument in two years. From that point, he has hardly put it down.

  In the ensuing weeks and months after that pivotal first lesson, I watched my son evolve like a human Pokémon from a surly, back-talking gamer to a surly back-talking musician in-the-making. (LOL.) To this day, Bill insists that it wasn’t The Experiment that changed him. It was the friends, and the teacher they’d led him to. “Ah. I see,” I reply.

  “The technology ban was nothing but a trigger,” he adds, a little less certainly.

  “Ah, a trigger,” I echo. (Bang, bang! I think to myself. Got ’im!)

  Sussy ended up switching friendship groups too. But she was under no illusions about the role The Experiment played in bringing about the change—nor was the Year 10 coordinator at her school. “Sussy has shown a marked improvement in terms of not only her demeanor but also her organization,” she wrote to me in April 2009. “She seems to be adapting to having to complete any electronic work at either school or at her friends’ house and her uniform has been consistently pleasing.” (A big clean-out of her bedroom uncovered not one, not two, but three “lost” name tags, which she took to wearing in a row on her blazer pocket, like war medals.) “Sussy seems to be a happier student who is becoming more independent and taking more responsibility for her learning.”

  Loss of Facebook (not to mention loss of MSN and MySpace) seemed to increase her focus generally; at the same time, it put her out of the loop with her old friends. “With Jen and Cat and that kind of group, you figure stuff out on the computer, like sleepovers and stuff,” she explained to me at our midterm interview. These invitations happened spontaneously, usually on the spur of the moment, in fact, with little or no notice. If you blinked—or, more to the point
, if you went offline—you missed them. The girls in Sussy’s new group at school didn’t operate like that. “We planned a sleepover a week in advance!” she told me proudly, and slightly incredulously.

  Sussy’s Experimental coping mechanisms differed from Anni’s and Bill’s significantly. The older kids took the opportunity to go out more—shopping, visiting, or clubbing in Anni’s case, and hanging out at the pool or jamming in somebody’s garage in Bill’s. Sussy had fewer friends who lived in the neighborhood, so she faced major transportation issues. Her best girlfriend, my goddaughter Maddi, lived in Melbourne. Her closest boy chum, Andy, had just moved with his family to England.

  Partly for these reasons, her overall media time budget probably remained unchanged.

  She clung to the landline like a drowning teenager to a life raft. After school, she’d install herself in the family room, echoey and airplane hangar-like now that it had been clear-felled of its media and their bulky accoutrements, and hold court before an unseen audience for two or three hours at a clip. She assured me that both Maddi and Andy had their parents’ permission to ring her as often as they liked; it seems they had magic Internet landlines that made long-distance calls for free “or just about.”

  “What if you need to ring them?” I wanted to know.

  “Easy. I just send them a signal—I ring once or twice and then hang up. Really, Mum, we’ve got it all figured out.”

  Many people have asked me if there was ever a moment during The Experiment when I was tempted to quit. Not counting April 25, the day I received a phone bill for $1,123.26, I can honestly say, no. Not at all.

  Digital Immigrants use technology to achieve specific ends. Digital Natives breathe technology in order to . . . well, breathe. To exist. Before The Experiment, Sussy had pretty much lived online. Now she was pretty much living on the phone. Cleverly, she also used it to gain access to banned media. “Google ‘Nick Jonas!’” she’d bark into the phone to Maddi, when the need to know the details of Miley Cyrus’s relationship status grew unbearably urgent, or, “Check my Facebook!” (the girls regularly, and companionably, hacked each other’s accounts anyhow), or, “Message Andy and tell him to ring me at eight my time.” Maddi was now more than a best friend. She was Sussy’s personal remote outsourcer, carrying out her digital bidding with terrifying dispatch.

  Their relationship changed in less obvious ways, too, during those marathon conversations, and so did her connection with Andy. “On MSN, you’re kind of almost waving at people. You get introduced, and it’s like hi and LOL and ILY and stuff . . . but you never really get to know them,” she explained to me. “On the phone, it’s totally different. It’s like D&M.d You get close. You get tight.”

  Anni agreed with that. “I think it’s definitely a more intimate thing. Talking on the phone isn’t the same as face-to-face, but it’s a step up because you have the tone of voice and everything, and you can infer so much more than from stuff that’s typed up. Texts are like decoding messages—so hard to interpret! It’s always like, what did they mean by that? Are they kidding? Are they being nice? Are they being condescending?”

  Do you think people are more honest in phone conversations? I ask Suss. “Yeah, and you explain stuff. And they ask questions and stuff, and . . . I don’t know. How am I supposed to know? CEEBS!” (Munted family acronym deriving from CBF—couldn’t be f#*#ed.)

  “Only connect.”

  “Only connect.”

  “Only connect.”

  With no new message alerts to distract me, I keep going back to Forster’s mantra . . . or was it a plea?

  What lies behind our mania for media, anyhow? Before, I assumed it was something to do with our insatiable appetite for entertainment, for data, for distraction. Now that we were in the purge stage of the bulimic cycle—digitally, that is—I wasn’t so sure. Maybe our most implacable desire, our most deeply human yearning, is simply to achieve contact. To . . . connect.

  James Harkin, author of Lost in Cyburbia, observes correctly that our new media deliver “connection” in an entirely unprecedented way. Old media delivered stories. Our new media—e-mail, IM, social networking, microblogging—deliver people. Social intercourse. Contact. The technological equivalent of holding hands, or even making eye contact.

  This drug we’re craving . . . could it simply be each other?

  For young people, the evidence is clear that Facebook is literally better than sex. And I do mean literally. According to Internet tracker Hitwise, visits to porn sites dropped by a third between 2005 and 2007. By 2009, the industry outlook was so grim that Hustler publisher Larry Flynt got on his knees to the federal government seeking a $5 billion “stimulus package.” (Ew.) Evidently the most precipitous loss of libido has been among users aged eighteen to twenty-four—the same demographic who, not at all coincidentally, have invented the joy of friending.

  Not only are social media better than sex, they reproduce more efficiently too. Network theory reminds us that the number of possible connections between points on a network rises much faster than the number of points themselves. (Two people with fax machines can only talk to each other. But five people with fax machines create twenty possible channels; and twenty people with twenty fax machines, 380.) The resulting explosion of connectivity, Harkin tells us, makes networks exponentially powerful. Just like kids, really. You give them an inch, and they take a gigabyte. When advertisers exploit this principle, they call it “going viral.” When Facebook or LinkedIn users do the same, we call it social or professional networking. When our kids do it on Facebook Chat or AOL or Google Talk, we call it a huge waste of time. Hmm.

  Seriously, it is exactly this network effect that turns a teenage birthday party for twenty close friends into a drunken, gate-crashing horde. Or that makes “sexting”—the mass forwarding of sexually explicit photos via cell phones—such an insidious and effective form of cyber-bullying. The network effect enables collaborative enterprises such as Wikipedia and YouTube (the latter so huge it accounts for 10 percent of the Internet’s entire bandwidth) and propels the careers of out-of-the-box upstarts such as Britain’s Got Talent’s Susan Boyle, or, for that matter, Barack Obama (an unabashed BlackBerry addict, let us not forget).

  James Harkin tells the story of Shoreditch Digital Bridge, a project that provided free Internet access to people living in a public housing estate in east London. As an afterthought, the project managers also decided to offer residents access to CCTV surveillance images. These security cameras were already providing twenty-four-hour monitoring of communal areas, so why not broadcast it as a channel like any other? Nine months later, a leaked report showed that residents watched the closed-circuit security channel as much as they did prime-time broadcast television. Literally more people tuned in to view each other than to see Big Brother.

  The medium has become the messenger. Caught in the sticky tendrils of Web 2.0, we stand transfixed, not by “data” or even “entertainment,” but by ourselves. What bedazzles us most of all is not the shock of the new but the shock of recognition. Of affirmation.

  “Only connect,” indeed. Could Forster have imagined how relevant that commandment would become in the age of Apple? For that matter, could he have imagined a $1,123.26 phone bill?

  Keeping oneself in the loop is all well and good—but where will it end? Well, that’s the thing about a loop. It doesn’t end. Futurist Raymond Kurzweil predicts a coming techno-evolutionary quantum leap that he calls “the singularity.” Beings of this new age, half human and half machine, will be endowed with enhanced, yet alien, brains and near-immortal lifespans.30 Gosh. Perhaps we will call them “teenagers.”

  May 3, 2009

  Have stocked up on CDs and tapes—tapes!—from the library, and Bill loving his new turntable. (“What do you like best about it?” “The crackle!”) Also confesses he enjoys the turning part of the turntable—just watching records revolve. A novelty, I guess, in a world of CDs and audio files. Has raided various friends’ parents�
� closets for LPs and amassed huge collection already: Doors, Bob Marley, Stones, Beatles.

  I sneak down to his bedroom sometimes just to see him lying on his bed, reading and listening to seventies music—“Like something out of Back to the Future,” Sussy hisses.

  Girls and self magged out with Wish, The New Yorker (great Lily Allen profile—now there’s a girl who knows about oversharing . . .), Sunday Times Magazine—local gossip column a total crack-up—and Girlfriend (“Is Your Boyf Too Metro?”). That’s entertainment.

  May 4

  Listening to music and doing nothing else at the same time? How weird is that?

  But am doing it anyway: practicing Thoreauesque attentiveness listening to my new Leonard Cohen CD.

  Overheard at dinner:

  BILL: I find school an intrusion on my saxophone practice. SUSS: I find your saxophone practice an intrusion on my life.

  Overheard after dinner:

  SUSS (ON PHONE—WHERE ELSE?): Oooh, sorry! Well, break a leg! ILY!!

  ANNI: What’s up? Is Maddi out on a date or something?

  SUSS: Nah, she’s just making her entrance in the school play.

  ANNI: WITH HER CELL PHONE SWITCHED ON??

  SUSS (WITH DIGNITY): Of course not. It’s on vibrate.

  May 9

  The Fremantle public library rocks. Hadn’t been there since I used to take the kids for story time and a hand-stamp back in the nineties. Go on Saturday afternoons now, after chores, and today check out six items JUST FOR ME! Weird Norman Mailer book about Jesus, On Kindness, some yoga book for the decrepit (i.e., me), The Namesake, The Death of the Grown-up (seemed appropriate under the circumstances), and a Thelonious Monk CD. Such a thrill of anticipation, bustling around making tea and laying the fire like some jazz-loving Jane Austen character.