by Adam Gopnik
It is not exactly an inspiring sight, this subway car on the W train—our usual car filled with a look so full of exhaustion that you might think we had been riding on this car forever. But one senses that if you look hard enough, you can see the things that draw people to cities, that drew my grandfather here seventy years ago and drew me here, too: possibility, and plurality, keep us riding still. I suppose that possibility is just as possible in the suburbs of Dallas or Phoenix, in some edge city near Atlanta, some floating island of residence levitating between two malls, but I don't quite believe it. Possibility still, in some significant part, depends on density; hope is the thing in a sweatshirt, riding the W train and reading the Daily News, a bird of another feather.
In five years, we have been through the hyper-excitements of the millennial arrival, through the darkest slough of despond there has been, then through a long nervous night, to emerge at last, not in the sunny uplands—there are no sunny uplands—but on the rational plateau, back to the park, where liberal pleasures were long ago planned from resistant materials. The amazing thing is not that we have gotten the children through it—they are made to be adaptable—but that they have gotten us through it, and made us glad. From the overstressed, ironic exasperation we felt when we first came home, to fear, to a tender appreciation of the city's rituals and joys underlined by its new vulnerability to—well, I suppose I ought to say to a deeper, more mature understanding, but really, it's just the old ironic exasperation, now revealed to be a kind of love. Every time the exasperation and the expense and even the plain worry rises, which it does regularly—why are we doing this? what for?—something holds us back. There's a lovely Dave Frishberg song about a man who leaves Manhattan, “Do You Still Miss New York?” He does. We would. We do already, when we think about it. The rush of emotion that rises as the car pulls down the Hudson Parkway, as the cab comes across the Triborough Bridge from La Guardia, the sense of a scale too big to be credited and of a potential too large to be quite real—all that remains available, which is the most you can say of any emotion. The other emotions—the daily frustrations, the long-term fears—remain available, too. The city we are in, the home we have made, and the other city we long for all remain in existence, and we travel with the children back and forth between, just the way I did when I was a child.
Perhaps the virtual world is the true immensity. (That's something I read, too.) The computers encircle the city, like the Orcs around Minas Tirith, and their grip on us is palpable. (The switch hotel was the first tent of the new occupation, and we as New Yorkers have become mere parakeets, interesting oddballs.)
To a frightening degree, our life is already like that of a minor, failed wizard in Tolkien: staring all day into a palantir, a seeing stone—for what else is an Internet connection? Denethor, the last Steward of Gondor in The Return of the King, goes mad because he stares into his seeing stone and sees not what is actually there, the real Middle Earth muddle, but only what Mordor wants him to see: the massed Orcs, the hopeless mortals, the gathering armies of the night.
We, in the same way, see only our own Mordor, the wasteland where metaphor and extended argument have all been blasted away, and all that remains are the massed Orcs of attitude and opinion.
This is Denethor's fallacy, Denethor's folly. In truth, just as there was more resistance left in the West than he was allowed to see, there are more variety and resilience and common sense and eccentric appetite and just plain individual taste in America than the partial view can provide. Every day when we look up from the screens and smell the coffee—in this case, the triple-grande cappuccinos that have overtaken the continent—hope begins again. The screens give a good sense of the American unconscious, but a very poor, or partial, sense of American life.
The Internet is a picture not of our life but of our dream world, where each of us is a little emperor of appetite and opinion and everyone has to listen. Our real life is the usual muddle of bounded desires and disappointments that we have trained ourselves to believe are actually wishes fulfilled in another way. To get back out into that common life, to force ourselves into the world—that is hard, and each of us must do it in some different way. The truly hard work is not to connect—we connect too damned easily—but to disconnect, to separate the noise and rage of the virtual world from the decent muddle of the real world. To decenter the children and unplug ourselves. If only we could!
In the end, the immensities of communication lead right back to the densities of people talking and touching. Luke has become, like all his friends, an IM fiend. The instant message is as much his form as the eight-line epistle was Horace Walpole's. This is true of all the ten-year-olds. They sit doing their homework, and despite a chorus of parental nos—your brain will shrink to the size of a walnut!—they are conducting three or four, sometimes six or seven, IM conversations at the same time.
Instant messaging demonstrates a profound truth: that manners do not follow the new comforts of technology, but that whatever technology offers next becomes the new form of manners. Fashion once again is our improbable savior, our real God. How laborious instant messaging is, and how scant and impoverished in information: not the warm instantaneous presence of a voice, with all its inflections of feeling, but laboriously keyboarded-in information, placed in code from sheer fatigue: “LOL” and “Whazzup?” and “GTG.” They are, it seems, moving relentlessly backward toward Morse code.
Had the instant message come first, and the telephone conversation second, what a triumphant technological breakthrough the phone call would now seem! How proudly the papers would unveil it, how breathlessly the business pages and Wired magazine would celebrate the innovation. Real-time conversation! Actual voices! Effortless dial-up-and-speak communication! No need to wear your fingers out just to say hello, how are you! At last the realm of the real voice; hear your sweetheart's breathing! Listen when your best friends cough. Enjoy! You are there, really there, at last. Steve Jobs would hold a press conference, holding the phone up high, with amazement. And the next day the back page of the business pages would have one of those defiant, declarative full-page ads: “Real speech! Real Time! The Real You.” It would be on the cover of all the newsmagazines the following week. (And there would be contrarian op-ed pieces in the Times:“Why I Will Never Make a ‘Phone’ Call;” “The ‘Phone Call’—Is It Killing the Keyboard?”)
Yet the children, who are free to pick up the phone and talk to one another just as we did, exchanging gossip and long-division tips, actually prefer the cryptic and limited vocabulary of the instant message. Partly, they prefer it for the same reason that they now prefer the Lord of the Ring miniatures to EA sports. Fashion always overwhelms logic. But I think, as I watch Luke doing his homework—the radio on Disney, playing the new kind of pop, keening, minor-key power ballads of loss rather than our peppy old ballads of fun or sweet ballads of love, love and loss now pounded together in a single chord sequence and drum pattern—that they also like it because of the control it offers. Talking is a form of the adult world's social ordering, and the IM is a powerful tool of children's independence. The keyboard is power; you give away just as much, just as often, as you want to.
Luke checks IMs idly as he works—just, let truth be told, as I check my e-mail steadily—and I realize that both are popular because that is what we really want: not to connect, not to disconnect, but to sorta connect, to turn even our strongest ties into weaker ties, where we can control them, reward them with little prepackaged bursts of geniality or warmth without being drawn into an open-ended exchange where anything might happen. (How well I recall the aimless hours on the telephone from my own youth, when we would meander far and wide and end up with hurt feelings or frustration, girls being adept at winding down a conversation you were trying to key up. The split screen in the movies was invented, of necessity, to represent these exchanges, this war.) IMing saves face; if you send it out and get no reply, there are a million rationalizations at hand. Make a phone call and you
put yourself at risk. The great advantage of e-mail, as it is of the Internet generally, is the isolation it provides even as it offers the appearance of interaction. What we want is not an exchange of ideas but a mutual tolerance of soliloquies.
It was the instant message, in fact, that for a while seemed to keep the day of reckoning, the day of flight, away. Every parent knows that there is going to come a time when your child will become, or begin to become, an adolescent, and you will become remote, distant, even despised. Yet knowing this and accepting it, we don't quite believe it. It is the mortality of parenting: You know for certain that it will happen, just as you know for certain that you are going to die, and that this is right and necessary, part of What Must Happen. But in some secret part of the soul we don't actually think it's going to happen to us. Just as we don't really believe we 'll die, no matter how many deaths we 've known, we don't believe that our children will be thirteen, no matter how many times we have seen thirteen, despite having been thirteen.
New York being New York, everything a gear faster, thirteen now begins around eleven. Every day now, Luke comes home from school at three-fifteen and I greet him at the door. I ask him how school has been, and where he used to answer, sometimes fully, now he just shrugs the high-shouldered shrug of the exasperated, and silently stalks into his room. This is the universal tragedy of three-fifteen p.m., as sure in its foreordained certainty as any Greek myth. The bell rings, the eleven-year-old enters—and the parent, knowing as surely as Oedipus knew never to doubt the Sphinx, knowing that he should never ask “How was school?” goes ahead and asks it anyway. Every parent is doomed to ask it, even as the Chorus of Parents Past chants at him not to.
And every parent is rewarded with the inevitable shrug and head-down glare, and then the boy walking into his room and shutting the door—not slamming it, certainly, but shutting it. And yet every day you do it again.
Then silence. You know that, can be pretty sure that, among other things, he's on his computer, IMing exasperatedly to his equally exasperated friends. Once again, you might feel safer with the old vices: You sort of wish you could smell the wholesome whiff of marijuana, the sounds of adolescent groping, the keening endless tedium of a phone call. Instead there is the silence of the multivoice instant message, passing from eleven-year-old to eleven-year-old, seven or eight running side by side on his screen at a time.
For a long time, I was shut out from instant messaging. It had seemed so remote. A curtain falls around the age of forty, and whatever the medium of electronic communication that was in place then remains the medium you use. If you were forty when the fax machine was in flower, you still send faxes, for all their snaky, mid-eighties kind of flimsiness. My parents still SPEAK UP on long-distance telephone calls, as they did in their early middle-age—while the children take a friend ringing in from Paris or Tokyo on the cell phone as just what happens, no more surprising than Sally dropping in at seven from upstairs. My grandfather still wanted to send telegrams to his grandchildren on their birthdays, was furious that he couldn't. Though I lived on e-mail and caffeine—just got onto that subway as the doors were closing—I had never sent or received an instant message.
Luke, though, who is always urging software onto me—Pandora! Skype! Limewire!—urged me to download the IM software from AOL and I did, that little man running nowhere in particular. And then that week, after the ritual observance of the three-fifteen tragedy, I saw the little IM icon on the bottom of the screen pinging and bouncing, urgently, happily. It was Luke! An IM from my son!
“Hey, Dad! Whazzup?” he wrote. “Nothing much. Whazzup with you?” I wrote back. “Not much.” “How was school?” “OK. I guess.” And then at three seventeen—minutes after having already established that nothing had happened all day at school, we had the conversation that he had denied at the door: what he 'd done that day, what he wanted to do that evening, homework to finish, movies to watch…. Everything we hadn't talked about face to face we exchanged in the IMs from fifteen feet apart. The three-thirty IM exchange became the best part of the day. It was practically Japanese in its formality: The doorbell would ring, I'd open the door, we'd bow at each other, he'd go silently into his room, I'd go into mine, and within moments the ping would happen and we'd write to each other about the events of the day, as though we were miles apart, days away.
I understood what he was doing. To submit to the parental three-fifteen is to surrender autonomy; to send complete messages from your own computer is to seize control of the means of communication, allowing you to declare both your autonomy and your essential goodwill. He was doing what children have to do: He was making me, his strongest tie, into a weaker tie, and then strengthening the tie again, but on his own terms. He is getting ready to go. He is putting his first shirt in the bottom of his eventual suitcase.
Still, here for a while, he taught me the language of instant message, all the simple abbreviations that make it work. He explained them to me when I was puzzled as they appeared on my computer screen: GTG means Got To Go. BRB: Be Right Back. U2: You, too. And above all, LOL—well, that one he didn't have to explain to me. It was obvious, as Olivia would say. It meant “Lots of Love.” I could tell because it occurred at the end of so many of his instant messages. So I sent it right back to him: LOL, Dad. LOL, Luke. I felt delighted. Whatever inevitable conflicts we might have, at the end of every one of these exchanges, we could still tell each other that we loved each other, and lots. He used it in response to the e-mails I sent him, even in the sententious, just-do-the-things-you-have-to-do ones. Despite the coming of adolescence, beckoning like a sad Thanksgiving, we could still send each other love.
And I adored this about IMing in general, the way that in three capital letters you could send lots of love to anyone you liked. My sister was getting divorced, and I sent her a message “I'm with you, and beside you. LOL, your brother.” A friend got terrible and unfair reviews for a book; I sent him LOL. Everyone for six months—editors, friends, I was riding the ecstacy of love messages that I was sending out, instantly.
Finally, after about six months of this, I was sitting in an airport lounge at eleven on a Friday night, off on one more trip—online, writing a goodbye IM to Luke. Explaining how much I hated being away from him for another weekend, how I had to do it to pay for his school, for our life. Heartfelt, heart-full, I signed it “LOL, Dad.” Then a pause. And I see appearing on my screen these words.
“Dad: what exactly do you think LOL means?”
“Lots of Love, obviously,” I replied.
A longer pause, and then a flurry of caps appeared on my screen, as though an urgent message was incoming from NORAD:
“NO, DAD! LOL MEANS ‘LAUGHING OUT LOUD’!!!!!”
“NO it doesn't!” I wrote back.
Then the icon of a big embarrassed face, an incredulous face:
“YES IT DOES DAD!!”
And of course it does. I realized that for the past six months I had been jeering at him sardonically when I thought I was sending him all my love. And he had been mocking my sententiousness when I thought he was responding to my wisdoms. I had been jeering sardonically at everyone, without knowing it, and now I was going to have to go back to all the people I'd been sending an instant message to and apologize for ridiculing them in the midst of their pain. I would have to repeal six months’ worth of LOLs. I decided to give up instant messaging. I am too old for it. It is for the young in one another's screens, with nimbler fingers and quicker minds than mine.
All afternoon as I write, I listen to Mike and the Mad Dog, the Kram-den and Norton of New York sports radio, dissecting the Yankees, the Mets, the Rangers. I love Mike's tired knowingness, contrasted with the Dog's eager, obsequious fatuity: “Dog, you know—this is just—just the most asinine phone call we've ever received …” “Yeah, Mike, you're right, you're right!” I can make Luke laugh by impersonating the two of them, Mr. Know-It-All and the Village Idiot, as Phil Mush-nick calls them in the New York Post.
When a new phone-caller comes on to give the expected greeting to Mike and the Dog, my heart lifts. “Longtime, first time,” the caller always says as he begins to make his well-intended contribution, only to get jumped on by Mike (“What are you saying? Whoa, whoa—you puttin’ A-Rod on the couch here?”). Longtime listener, first-time caller: This is the endless mantra of Mike and the Mad Dog. I have long been part of your audience, and now, suddenly, by an act of grace and good fortune, I am up there with you. The eventfulness of this idea—a listener, one of the anonymous mass, suddenly becomes a participant, pitting his wits against the wits of Mike Francesca—there is something absurd and beautiful about it, something bar mitzvah and first communion: I was a listener, and today I become a caller. Longtime, first time. Half the time in New York, I think that I am a longtime observer, first-time participant. Longtime shopper, first-time lover. First-time observer, longtime resident. Longtime first time, all the time.