Archives for April 2013

I often wonder what a poet like Emily Dickinson would make of today’s online world. In the 19th century she wrote a poem about the moment of her death. People often imagine what it would be like to attend their own funerals. Would people say nice things about them? Would that jerk who picked on them in fifth grade break down in a puddle of remorse and grief? Would that person they had always lusted after admit, just too late, that they had felt the attraction?

The online world is so hypnotic in part, I think, because we can create scenarios where we can actually witness how people might talk about us at our funeral. Consider, for example, what happens if you decide to go off the grid for a long time. When you come back, isn’t it interesting to see who started to wonder where you were? Who noticed you were gone? Who started to leave notes of concern because you suddenly had gone quiet?

How many times do you sign off and then take a quick peek on your phone to see who says, “I’ll miss you!”?

And yet, these are dangerous games we play. Trying to manipulate daily, weekly, or monthly grieving for our absence can have dire consequences. The most obvious one is that for many people, the online world is something that is engaged in with something short of full attention. When people sign in, they are here to promote their thoughts, their content, their ideas – themselves. This is not to say that they fail to enjoy your company when you’re around, but your absence may not leave an impression on them. Indeed, as sad as it is to ponder, it might not even register with them that we’ve been gone for ages (like, two days or so). For people who depend on the online world for their sense of well-being, this could be devastating. It could lead to a downward spiral. “No one cares about me, see, I told you!”

The online world is seductive. You can be anything you want to be. You can even post pictures of people who aren’t you and pretend that it is you. You can create  a voice for yourself. In fact, bloggers are told that this is a must. You can highlight only the parts of your life that are most spectacular, and indeed, you can make those up too.

What we can’t make up, however, is that real feeling of human connection. This is what people who purchase fans and followers really miss, I fear. You could have 50,000 followers, 100,000 blog subscribers, however many fans you can muster on Facebook, but how many of those people are connected enough with you that they would notice your absence? Taking it one step further, how many would begin to get concerned over a longer period of time? For people who depend on these followers for affection, validation, or positive reinforcement, this lack of attention, perceived as lack of care, could, I hypothesize, be rather a hard blow.

Is this why people seem so antsy when it comes to the online world? Are people looking for a type of fulfillment that seems so much within reach, but then floats away out into the ether? Is this why people sometimes cry out for attention, because they want to know someone really does notice them and acknowledge their existence?

Are we playing with fire here?

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When you get involved in online communication, it’s very easy to quickly reach a point where you are communicating with people all of the time. Multitasking has become the new “must” skill, and much of our multitasking talents are used for entertaining chatter while we are working, doing homework, cooking, or even driving. Despite this 24/7 communication online or via text messages, however, our willingness to relate to real people in the moment, face-to-face, is dwindling. All of the signs point to it.

This was first brought to my attention by Ellen Bremen (aka @ChattyProf). Ellen is a communications professor, and as such she has undertaken a seemingly simple experiment. She invites her students to “fast” from social media and texting for three days. The only way you’re allowed to communicate with people is in-person or via the phone. Old-fashioned ways. Ellen’s students, who range in ages, almost universally struggled with this task. In this intriguing #HecklersHangout chat I co-hosted with Brian Vickery, Ellen talks about students who told her, “When I met my friends in person, we couldn’t really talk. We didn’t know how to relate.” Students accused her of making them doubt how real their friendships were. Many, unable to coordinate outings, ended up feeling more isolated and more alone than they ever had before.

This is not just mythology, but we don’t talk about these new complexities outright. What I do notice is that when friends who haven’t seen each other for a long time get together, they post pictures of their meal to Facebook. They post pictures of themselves to Instagram. And as people comment, they continue to reply. I often picture a table with two friends (or more) who were looking forward to seeing each other…maybe, sort of…sitting with their heads down, fingers tapping away. Maybe they talk about a comment their tagged picture got. They are bringing their online means of connection into the “real” world, but they are not really engaging with each other in meaningful ways. We see this all the time, but we don’t comment on why this happens. No one ever says, “Don’t you want to put your phone away and talk to that friend?”

I wonder if I’m the only one thinking it.

Even more disturbing is a trend that Sherry Turkle points out in Alone Together. Numerous children in her study report that as they get into their parents’ cars after school, their parent may not even look up from the phone, or the parent might give that now common wave. “Give me just a minute, I’m finishing this.” One teen Turkle quotes notes that she waits for the time that her mom picks her up and says, “Hi, how was your day.” At the same time, the teen notes that her mom will never change. The phone will never leave. Indeed, Turkle even tells the account of a man who becomes infatuated with his Second Life wife. He texts to her, essentially committing a new kind of adultery, while pushing his child on a swing with the other hand.

Children, according to Turkle, do not ignore these moments when they want to engage with their parents but are placed as a second priority to their parents’ emails, social media, or texting. One son notes that he and his dad used to watch football games together and it was a great time to bond. Now the dad is buried in his phone and they barely talk to each other. This leaves children, in real life, feeling abandoned. It opens them up to the idea that maybe real-life connections aren’t as reliable, or as predictable, as online connections. If we are talking about how we turn each other into robots in the world of social media, we can see how we are creating a generation of potentially very confused young people.

We all are tied to our phones because of work these days. We all are getting more email than we can handle. But we need to take a moment to weigh a 20-minute lag in responding to an email versus losing a connection with people we love. Is that email or text really worth that? This may seem dramatic, but I do not believe it’s overstating the fact. Over time, we are sending the message, “This is more important than my time with you.”

We don’t want to do that. Do we?

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In today’s world, we are bombarded with bad news. Murders, holes in the ozone, wars, people who are starving, people who are homeless, bad unemployment numbers, shaky governments, and so on. It’s no wonder that humans are looking for something grand, something full of affection and validation. What is different about this time period versus times that have passed is that all we have to do to start building illusions of grandeur is create a social media account.

Consider this. If I had gone up to you in say, 1995, and said, “Guess what? There are about 7,000 people who follow things that I say, and often they share or respond to those comments,” would you have congratulated me? Probably not. More likely, you’d have thought I was some crazy drug addict who was riding a high. But today, this is commonplace. Indeed, there are people who can say that they have a million followers on Twitter. There are people who write blog posts and it immediately gets acted on THOUSANDS of times.

In the online world, we can create whatever image of ourselves we want. Our gut reaction to this fact is to say, “Well, I’m authentically who I am.” But that’s not 100% true for any of us, is it? The online world offers us a place where we can get an entire thought out without being hissed at, disagreed with, interrupted, or ignored. In the online world, we can say something and people, if we are lucky, will say, “Wow, that was really smart.” How often do we get that in our real lives? How often do you talk to a spouse, a parent, a co-worker, or a friend and hear in return, “That’s a fascinating way to look at things. I’m going to tell 500 people you said that,”? How many times do you hear, in the offline world, “What you said really made my day?” How many times is your day made by what someone says or does? The online world is a heady place. If we want to, we can believe that having a lot of followers, a lot of connections, means that what we are saying is 100% important all of the time. Everything we are saying has deep meaning. Everything we do is improving the world. Our online world may become more rewarding than our actual lives, though most people would shudder to think of such a thing.

I just watched a documentary by Vikram Gandhi called Kumaré. The story is fascinating and could easily be translated into a parable of the online experience. Gandhi grew up in a family that wanted to instill in him his Hindu roots even though he was growing up as an American citizen, in the “melting pot,” as so many have called it. The more Gandhi was exposed to gurus and other spiritual leaders, the more convinced he was that the whole host of them were rubbish. Although he does not pointedly say that gurus can hurt people in obvious ways, he clearly feels, at the beginning of the documentary, that people put far too much trust into such people.

To help fight this trend, Gandhi creates for himself a Guru character called Kumaré. He sets up shop in Phoenix with two friends acting as his first disciples (and PR associates). Ultimately, Kumaré becomes increasingly real. People start telling him their darkest secrets and their deepest fears, and while he remains fully cognizant that he is not really equipped to help these people, he does not reveal his true identity until the very end, about 4 months after he leaves his enclave and 14 disciples. Through the course of teaching people that they don’t need an external guru, Gandhi, as Kumaré, actually benefits all of the people he has adopted as students. One woman loses 70 pounds. One man starts thinking of ways, every day, to make his wife happy. Another man is working on letting go of his anger. These are all great things. But when Gandhi reveals that he himself was a hoax, you get a sense that even the people who experienced these massive positive changes now feel stupid. They entrusted a person with their hearts, and the person turned out to be a fiction.

Does this, however, mean the improvements in their lives are less real? They may feel betrayed, but if they hold on to their new habits, was it all bad? Was it all imaginary?

If a person who is going through a depression finds comfort in the online world, does that make their comfort any less real? If a person who feels ignored at work gets a lot of responses to their content in the online world, is that confidence boost a bad thing, or is it just a 3D figment of our imaginations? Pragmatism suggests we should not worry about how we find contentment so long as we get there, but if our happiness begins to depend on 2-dimensional avatars of people we will never see offline, is that a good thing? Is online acceptance less real than a high school clique?

Social Media gives us an opportunity to become a guru and to follow gurus. We can define these words however we like. We can manipulate people so easily. It’s easier than what Vikram Gandhi did. He faced people every day for months as he lied to them. All we have to do is find a picture of someone else, someone else’s house, someone else’s family, and say that it’s us, our own. When we get uncomfortable with our hoax, we can turn the computer off till we get our courage up again. Most people, hopefully, do not go to this extent to create their illusion of grandeur, but we know it happens. And it happens in lesser degrees far more than we’d like to admit.

Is social media a help or a danger? Are these feelings of affection and validation good or an evil masquerading as something beneficial? How do we define all of these words? Perhaps it depends on the individual.

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Back in 2010, I think, I decided that I was done with Facebook. OK, this wasn’t the first time I had come to that conclusion and it would not be the last. In this particular case, I decided I would go back to where my online experience had started, which was the blogging platform called Livejournal. There was a lot I was not liking about Facebook. I did not like how easy it was for me (and others) to post banal, meaningless details about our lives. Livejournal gave me an opportunity to noodle a thought, write it out, and then get more than a “thumbs up” when I was done, if anyone was in the mood to react at all. On Livejournal I was connected to people I had known in my college years, primarily. Facebook was full of people i had met online, and I was becoming confused about our relationships. Were we friends? Facebook said so. I didn’t feel like dealing with the moral dilemma, I guess.

Shortly after deciding that Facebook and I were history, a big thunderstorm rolled into my neighborhood. I did not take this as a sign from above that I had made a mistake, but I did notice that my immediate impulse was to post to Facebook. “It’s thunderstorming! I love thunderstorms!” What was that all about? Who cares that it’s thunderstorming? In fact, more to the point, who cares that I love thunderstorms? What was this new instinct all about? Something happened, I must report it to people I may not know at all.

Of course, I returned to Facebook after some short amount of time, and I have never really returned to my old friend Livejournal. My Facebook world is a hybrid of communities that represent a “This is your life” amalgam for me now. There are people on Facebook with whom I went to nursery school. There are high school friends, college, friends, grad school friends, work friends, and people I have met over my years “doing” social media for my family’s full-service marketing firm. Indeed, if you traced my connections chronologically you’d have a good start on the story of my life. But this does not explain the urge I experience to report on random things throughout the day. “It’s snowing.” “It’s warm.” “It’s cold.” Of course my statements are not so simplistic, but in the grand scheme of things, that is about the level of significance many of my Facebook updates carry with them.

This is not a self-condemnation. I am of course not the only one who posts things to Facebook that reflect the everyday grind of life. People post pictures of what they are eating. I’ve seen people post pictures of an empty plate, noting that what had once resided on that plate was really tasty. They ate it all. Do I need to know these things? I don’t know what my parents eat for dinner most of the time, nor do I really care. Same for the rest of my family, unless they are eating something I’m really jealous of. Yet every day I comment on pictures of peoples’ food, pictures of peoples’ new shoes, peoples’ observations about airports and grocery stores. Why do we post these things?

I pose this question rhetorically. I don’t have an answer. For me I would say it has become a habit over the years. You might even sy it has become an addiction. Through these tiny humdrum updates I have built real friendships, so each little one can’t be a waste of time. Sometimes posting something seemingly unimportant touches another person in an unexpected way and you learn something about them they may not even have thought about. I like the unpredictability of those kinds of interactions.

I think there is more to the story though. I am often puzzled as to why people post pictures of their food to Facebook while they are out with their spouse to celebrate an anniversary. Why do people post pictures of themselves snuggling with their children? Shouldn’t the focus be exclusively on the spouse, exclusively on the child? Why do people who say they are content with their lives spend hours every day staring at a computer or phone screen, typing to people who are not there. Typing to people who may even be on the other side of the world?

I am reading an amazing book by Sherry Turkle called Alone Together. Right now she is exploring how humans interact with robots that are intended to mimic facets of human nature. Turkle notes again and again that when humans engage with Artificial Intelligence, the human mind changes in a very short period of time. The robot evolves from “a machine” to something the human wants to earn affection from. The robot is anthropormorphised. It is given a name, it is attributed feelings like caring, likes, and dislikes. The human has something missing, and suddenly there is something that can fill that hole, whatever it may be. A child who feels it does not get enough attention can suddenly receive undivided attention from these robots. A person who feels unimportant can become proud if they teach a robot a new word or action.

Is this why we interact online the way we do? Perhaps I post that I like thunderstorms because I want to share that joy with other people. Perhaps people share pictures of them with their children because they feel a need to prove that they spend enough time with their children. Perhaps people post pictures of new purchases or great meals because they want to prove that their lives are really good. Who are they proving that to, however? To others? Or are we all looking for a pat on the back from people, some nod of encouragement saying that even with the craziness in this world, we’re doing ok?

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how coaches, teachers, and parents are raising kids with an “everybody’s a winner” mentality. I remember when this surfaced during my childhood. My brother participated in a competitive event called Odyssey of the Mind. He and the other kids on his team worked for weeks, really hard, on what they were going to do. All of the other competitors worked really hard too. At the end of the day, it was announced that there were no winners because everyone who had participated was a winner. I seem to remember a distinct groan from everyone who was there. Or consider the quote from the Pixar movie The Incredibles. “If everyone is special, no one is.” If we’re all winners and all special, we are like everybody else. There is nothing remarkable about us. Maybe we need our online interactions to accentuate what makes us unique.

Why do we post the things we do? It is a hard thing to think about. It’s like that childhood moment when suddenly you realize you’re too old to play “house.” The dolls aren’t real, you’re not really a mom or dad, and anyway, real life may not be so great as to want to play it out more than you have to. Pulling back the curtain of why we post the things we do can make us ponder things about ourselves we don’t really want to think about. Flaws. Bad feelings. Things we know we need to work on but don’t really want to. Are you willing to take the journey?

First Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/openpad/3718789722/sizes/s/in/photostream/ via Creative Commons

Second Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22261474@N08/8272939201/ via Creative Commons

About a year ago, Olivier Blanchard wrote a post called Social Media 1918. It’s an amazing post (obviously, if it is still on my mind a year later), but upon reading it I became reacquainted with a sad fact. Whereas Olivier can easily trace his lineage back along some of the “stuff” his ancestors carried around, I am not so lucky. Geoff Livingston’s recent (equally amazing) post, called Antisemitism in the United States, again stamped a single fact into my head. Although Geoff’s family history is sad, he knows it and it impacts how he views the world. I don’t really know my family’s story. I don’t know about the triumphs and pain that resulted in well, me.

I wonder if this lack of connection with my roots is in part because most branches of my family haven’t been in the US for very long. On my mom’s side, I have a great-grandfather from Switzerland and a great-great grandmother from Ireland. My dad’s side of the family has only been here a short time. My great-grandparents were all born in Russia.

I am left with tantalizing tidbits that don’t make sense. I know that my grandfather fought in WWII because I have a picture of him in uniform with his parents, but I have no idea what branch he fought in, where he went, or what he did. I know that two of my great-grandparents came from Odessa, Russia, and the other two came from Berditchev. Why did they leave? Did they suffer from pogram-related violence? Did we lose family members due to anti-semitism? Or maybe they just saw the tide was turning.

Why did both sets of my great-grandparents change their names immediately upon arriving here in the US? The Kupcinets became Claymans. Why? The Bendisheets changed their surname to Bendis. Did my great-grandparents know family who were here already who had adopted those names? How do you get “Clayman” from “Kupcinet” anyway?

I do have pictures in some case, but this leads to only more mystery. Take this picture, for example:

The woman on the left is my great-grandmother, Lena Bendis. The woman in the middle is my grandmother. Who is the woman on the right though? I have no idea. One would assume it might be my great-great grandmother, but I don’t know. I find this heart-breaking.

Or consider this picture:

The baby in this picture is my great-grandfather Alfred Fuhrur, who was from Switzerland. I don’t know, off the top of my head, what his parents’ names were. I don’t really know his siblings’ names, either. I don’t know what made them come to the US from Switzerland. I don’t know why we have cousins from that side of the family who spoke French (my grandmother was fluent enough to write letters in French) yet the surname is German. I don’t know why my great-grandfather returned to Switzerland and then came back to Pennsylvania.

I don’t know why my great-great grandmother left Ireland all by herself as a young girl. Did she leave any relatives behind or was she the last remaining member of her family?

There are branches of my family who have been here in the US for a long time, but I still only have tidbits. We allegedly had people on the Mayflower. One of my ancestors apparently knew George Washington. In the Civil War, our Tennessee branch of the family was torn apart, but I don’t know any of the names of the players.

Maybe they were the sons of this woman, whose name was apparently Sophronia Potter:

I have an ancestor with the improbable name of King David Russell. My great-great grandparents were known as Old Pap and Mammy Sally, and I think it was Mammy Sally who had Cherokee blood. How does that root travel through the soil of my past? I have no idea.

I wonder if a lot of Americans have this kind of experience. A recipe here, a photo there, some doodads over there, but nothing solid. No real stories, because everything was left behind, and it was too painful to talk about what had been lost.

Do you know your family’s story? How far can you go back? Do we need to emphasize our ancestry more? Is this a cultural thing?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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