by John Freeman
Brown ended up walking away from his spill—indeed, in July 2008 he made a successful return to the Mega Ramp— so clearly his hecklers weren’t nearly as forceful as his internal willpower. But there are other instances in which disinhibited jeering from the sidelines can cause grave damage. Young kids, such as Megan Meier, who spend more time online than any other group, are in the line of fire of Internet-related disinhibition. A recent study conducted at a middle school in the United States revealed that 17 percent of the student body had experienced some form of cyberbullying, whether it was hostile and threatening e-mails, demeaning posts on Facebook or MySpace, or videos or pictures posted on YouTube without their permission.
Children and teenagers, whose prefrontal cortexes are still developing, face increasing risks over the Internet, since they are just beginning to learn their inhibitions. “During adolescence there is a developmental lag,” Goleman has written, “with teenagers having fragile inhibitory capacities, but fully ripe emotional impulsivity.” This leads to flaming and even harassment of teachers. In 2007, Danielle McGuire, a teacher at the New York prep school Horace Mann, discovered that some students, who happened to be children of school trustees, had put up a page on Facebook entitled “McGuire Survivors 2006,” portraying her as a witch and a liberal brainwasher. When she asked the school to deal with the situation, she was shocked to discover that the trustees wanted her disciplined for accessing their children’s Facebook pages. After a school-wide disruption, the students were given a slap on the wrist and McGuire was later told the school would not be renewing her teaching contract.
Disinhibition also increasingly leads to sexual bravado. It used to be that teenagers passed notes in class; now, it seems, many of them are e-mailing or texting naked photos of themselves—or others—back and forth. In Santa Fe, Texas, school administrators confiscated dozens of mobile phones after naked pictures of two junior high girls began passing from inbox to inbox. The girls had sent their pictures to their boyfriends, who, like the boyfriend of Claire, who was made infamous for her joke about oral sex, passed them along. In Wisconsin, a seventeen-year-old was charged with child pornography after he posted naked photos of his sixteen-year-old ex-girlfriend on MySpace after she broke up with him. In some cases, naked photos of teenagers have wended their way back to parents.
There’s an irony to this state of existence. The computer and e-mail were sold to us as tools of liberation, but they have actually inhibited our ability to conduct our lives mindfully, with the deliberation and consideration that are the hallmark of true agency. We react impulsively, quickly, and must face the consequences later. Our minds, augmented now by the largest, most usable database in the world, are hampered in basic functions such as showing kindness, restraint, and empathy. Digital believers will say that this is just the messiness of true democracy, that we all need to have thicker skins—that there are downsides to all change and the only thing we can count on is change, so adapt or be de-evolved from society.
But if we want to truly have power as individuals, we will preserve the right to push back on this electronic environment that has become such a key component of our day-to-day lives— to tinker with it and, if that doesn’t work, resist its basic assumptions as best we can. In coming decades, we’re going to have to think hard about whether we want to challenge the urgency, ubiquity, and Wild West quality of electronic communication— because doing so might mean shedding some of the trappings of this newly augmented, free-floating idea of ourselves in order to return to a life where things go a little more slowly.
5
DAWN OF THE MACHINES
In the ongoing television drama Star Trek: The Next Generation, one of the creepiest invasion threats comes from a race of cybernetics-enhanced aliens called the Borg. Zipped into bodysuits crenellated with wires and exposed electronics, their headsets gouging deep staplelike grooves into their humanoid flesh, they make a gruesome spectacle of a constantly connected life-form. The Borg—there is no singular—do not operate as individuals but as a hive, their minds plugged into a collective consciousness that they experience in their heads as thousands of voices speaking all at once. The Borg’s goal is perfection, and they achieve it by adapting the biological and technological innovations of other species. “You will be assimilated,” they state matter-of-factly upon encountering crew ships. “Resistance is futile.”
It’s hard to find a more potent metaphor for the dangers of the man-machine melding that we have experienced in the last fifty years. Science fiction may not always predict the future, but it is often a brilliant countermythology—a visible cultural symptom—of our prevailing anxieties. Is this the direction in which we are going or how we feel now? A collective society all talking inside one another’s heads, in search of perfection, constantly plugged in? It’s an extreme example, perhaps, but it’s important for us to step back to look at the social implications of our ever-proliferating, ever-accelerating forms of communication technology. It’s a task that is harder than ever, given how e-mail has pulverized our days into bite-sized moments of attention.
In fact, one doesn’t have to reach forward into science fiction to examine the ramifications—and extremes—of our plugged-in world. We can simply turn back the clock a hundred years to the technology that began this journey to our hyperconnected now—the telegraph—and the people who operated it. Indeed, the creation of the Internet and the explosion of e-mail as a communication tool have turned everyday office workers into the telegraph operators of the twenty-first century.
Speed was valued above all else: the fastest operators were known as bonus men, because a bonus was offered to operators who could exceed the normal quota for sending and receiving messages. So-called first class operators could handle about sixty messages an hour—a rate of twenty-five to thirty words per minute—but the bonus men could handle even more without a loss in accuracy, sometimes reaching speeds of forty words per minute or more.
One hopes we never get to the point that sending sixty e-mails per hour is normal, but it’s worth remembering that telegraph operators were merely transcribing messages, they weren’t creating them. Still, at two hundred e-mails a day and growing, the average office worker isn’t trailing far behind this pace, and the cognitive and emotional juggling required to maintain this rhythm is leading us toward a situation that many telegraph operators experienced: burnout. Telegraph operators regularly lost their tempers; they changed jobs a lot; and some even had breakdowns due to stress. New communication technology is supposed to—and constantly promises to—make our lives easier, but the prevalence of e-mail and its burdens is sending us in the same direction as those men and women who, a hundred years ago, lived out on the electronic frontier.
According to the social psychologist Christina Maslach, who created the first diagnostic inventory of burnout, there are three trademark symptoms: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a reduced sense of individual accomplishment. “How much time do you spend sorting through e-mail?” she asks in The Truth About Burnout. “The power of technology is paid for in both time and money.” It’s also paid for in workers’ health.
This sort of workplace stress cost America $300 billion in 2004. That same year, it cost England 13 million working days. In one English study of thirty thousand workers, mental health problems that could be traced back to stress were the second leading cause of missed work after muscle-related issues such as bad backs. It’s an issue around the world. Another survey of 115,000 people in 33 countries discovered that excessive work hours and expectations had made work a major cause of health problems. Thirteen percent of the respondents had trouble sleeping at night due to workday concerns. Forty percent of the people who responded said that taking sick days made them feel guilty.
The fact that this rapid speeding up of our jobs is occurring at a stage of capitalism’s evolution toward a hyperinter-connected global marketplace where corporations can leverage employees against competing job applicants in lower-w
age markets and the increasing use of workers in “nontraditional” work arrangements—such as freelancers and part-timers, many without health insurance or other benefits—makes resisting the process even harder.
The Internet bubble has long since burst, along with the housing bubble, but our culture has yet to shed its hyperventilated business expectations. Entrepreneurs and workers who can’t deliver are failures. “If you work in the Internet business, you’re a 25-year-old with a $30 million initial public offering (IPO),” wrote Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin in 2000. “Anything less means you’re an abject loser.” Companies have constructed their business model around perennial double-digit growth. Getting this growth requires some draconian measures. In March 2008, Jason Calacanis, the CEO of Mahalo.com, drew waves of criticism when he posted “How to Save Money Running a Startup” on his blog. The list included holding meetings over lunch, buying employees computers so they can work at home and after hours, investing in a good coffee machine, and most controversially, “fire people who are not workaholics.”
The expectations and concomitant stress trickle down to people who do not even work in the tech industry, thanks to cultural worship of their success and the groups of people who make money by investing in it through hedge funds, smart stock tips, or just plain dumb luck. In Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, Gary, the banker brother of the book’s protagonist, Chip, cannot help but feel he somehow missed the boat, that he is behind the times, and that that makes him not just unrich but uncool. “All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary—of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn’t have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool.”
One group of workers who are feeling this strain more than most—aside from the people who have actually lost their jobs— are bloggers, since some of them are tasked with staying on top of the continuous news and product cycle. In 2008, two technology bloggers may even have blogged themselves to death. Russell Shaw, a contributor to ZDNET, and Marc Orchant, another U.S. tech blogger, died as a result of massive coronaries on the job. The pressures of this environment are unbearable. “There’s always a new mobile phone whose clunkiness requires dissection, a new security flaw in Windows Vista, or a new USB drive shaped to look like a piece of fruit,” wrote Peter Robinson in The Guardian. “Keeping on top of it all is an almost impossible task, but people try, and they burn out, knowing that if they sleep, they’re scooped.”
As e-mail use grows, the stresses of working at this frantic pace will only compound, becoming an ever-stronger feedback loop. We may not quite e-mail ourselves to death, but on heavy days it can feel as if we’re getting close to it. A society of people living constantly in this frame of mind does not make for a pleasant place. Impulse gratification is highly catered to in the Western world—it’s what keeps the capitalist market running, after all. Most of our purely biological and social needs are simple; we need to create other needs in order to have a reason for purchasing something, for buying based on brand rather than on quality, for believing—as advertisements tell us—that a car or a chair or a pair of jeans will make us a different person, as glamorous as the one in the picture.
By parceling our days into smaller and smaller units, by giving us the impression that we can reach all people, at all times, e-mail is helping to put this cycle of overworking and impatient desire for gratification into hyperdrive. We work to live, the saying goes, but when work takes everything, what’s the point? Changing gears at the end of the day only reminds us how much work is taking from us—all while advertisements tell us the sky is the limit. It’s almost easier to keep working. And people do. A 2000 study showed that 40 percent of people work overtime at least once a week—and people who earned between $30,000 and $60,000 were three times as likely as people making less than $30,000 to bring work home. It’s almost considered chic to be a workaholic. In early 2008, the pop star Madonna, who had made herself famous as the material girl, admitted to Elle magazine that she and her husband, Guy Ritchie, were so busy that both of them slept with their BlackBerry under their pillows. “It’s not unromantic,” she protested. “It’s practical. I’m sure loads of couples have their BlackBerrys in bed with them. I often wake up in the middle of the night and remember that I’ve forgotten something, so I jump up and make notes.” News of the couple’s impending divorce began trickling out in the summer of 2008.
New technology tools from broadband access to mobile phones to mobile Internet have indeed made work more convenient. The new flexible workplace allows people to skip a commute when traffic snarls, work remotely, schedule their work around their life. “It’s the proverbial blessing and curse,” said Douglas M. Steenland, the CEO of Northwest Airlines, of his BlackBerry in 2005. “It’s a blessing because it liberates you from the office. It’s a curse because there’s no escape.” The downside to this existence, which many non-CEOs now share, is that we never totally shut off and live in the present with our spouses or friends or family. “Blending is a bland term that disguises what is really a new mind-body problem,’ says Professor Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist at Berkeley. “For some people, like your neighbors and sometimes your children, your body is there but your mind is not. And for others, like your workmates, your mind is there but your body is not. Sometimes it’s nice to have both your mind and your body present.’”
This state of living on parallel tracks has always been part of married life—the challenge always being finding moments to connect. As e-mail went mobile and became domesticated, though, it evolved into a great enabler for people to stay disconnected from one another—an irony given that one of BlackBerry’s advertising slogans is “Connect to everything you love.” A Berkeley woman whose husband brings his handheld device under the covers described the experience in terms more fitting for an affair. “It’s a kind of ménage à trois that I didn’t choose, but there it is, every day and night,” she said in a New York Times article. “There is something about that tap-tap-tap that makes me a little crazy,” said another woman, who was considering confining her husband’s bedtime e-mailing to business trips.
Spouses are not the only ones neglected when we can’t put down our e-mail. A whole generation of children will grow up with ever more distracted parents. In an interview with The New York Times, Bruce Mehlman, former assistant secretary of commerce for technology policy, argued that mobile access to e-mail and the Internet allowed him to spend less time at work and more with his kids. He then described having Lego dogfights with his son, one hand on the imaginary plane, the other on his BlackBerry. When he needs a break to clock in, Mehlman made sure to win the “dogfight.” “While he rebuilds his plane, I check my e-mail on the BlackBerry,” he explained.
There is a small but telling lesson buried in this untouching tableau. The Industrial Revolution, which mechanized production on a scale never before seen in human life, also produced the movement for the eight-hour workday. Men, women, and children couldn’t keep up with the durable, mindless muscle of machines. As early as 1817, the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen instituted the slogan “Eight hours work, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.” It took another century, however, for this idea to become law. It wasn’t codified in the United States until 1938, when the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, making it the legal American workday—this in a society that was still climbing out of the Great Depression and into a war. Seventy-five years later, however, our abuse and worship of essentially useful technology have chipped away at this framework. It has readjusted our expectations and, more important, made the company, the corporation and its needs, the dominant context in our lives. And we are going along with it because it makes us feel good, needed, important, connected. We are also being paid less, and to resist would in some cases mean losing our job
s. It is important to note, though, that this is not the only contextual shift e-mail has brought about or accelerated.
It Is All About Me
As we spend more and more time online, working at great speed via e-mail on behalf of our employers, it is only natural for us to try and bring the Internet back to ourselves. One of the great paradoxes about e-mail is that although it is created, driven, and indelibly marked by ourselves, heavy use of it can leave you feeling emptied out, voided, fractured into a million bits and quips, yet somehow obliterated. The cultural critic Fredric Jameson’s comments on postmodern architecture could apply well here: “A constant busyness gives the feeling that emptiness is here absolutely packed, that is an element within which you yourself are immersed, without any of that distance that formerly enabled the perception of perspective or volume…. You are in this hyperspace up to your eyes and body.”
In the past couple years, several tools have developed to help us feel—in this new work and living environment—whole again. Social networking Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook are at the forefront of this movement and have become hugely popular for this reason. Facebook was launched on the campus of Harvard University by a sophomore, Mark Zuckerberg, in February 2004 as a way to help his classmates connect online. Within a month, half of the university’s undergraduates had signed on; a month later it was expanded to several other Ivy League universities and thereafter to colleges and high schools. Soon everyone wanted to join in. More and more users were over thirty years old, but Facebook’s greatest support continued to be among college students. A 2006 survey found that Facebook was the second-most popular thing among college students after the iPod; it tied for second with beer. In 2006 it had 9 million registered users. By the summer of 2009, that number had rocketed to 250 million.
