“Too much social interaction!” a young friend of mine is roaring, sitting on his heels in his swiveling desk chair. A proficient internet pilot, like many of his generation, he has been showing me a computer game based on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one of several books we’ve read together. He also mentions an online version of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. I start telling him about the old days, when D&D players sat around a kitchen table rolling dice. I’m just getting to the part about my generation staying up late over cold pizza and flat soda. That’s when he breaks in, cutting off the reminiscence: “Too much interaction face to face!”
He’s kidding, I think. As a teacher, I can attest that most 6th-grade humor has the consistency of roasted chestnuts. This particular 11-year-old, though, constitutes an exception. He’s got a wit that’s hard and sparkly as diamonds. The first time I met with him, I asked him whether he knew what it meant to “infer.” He told me he’d encountered the word “inferences” before. “So I can infer what it means.”
Now he confirms for me the ironic tone of his protest, as he goes on playfully to describe a future world where young people will hunch over devices texting each other even when they’re together in the same room.
Much has been made, and for a good long time now, out of the isolating effects of time spent online. Sociological studies, widely publicized on the internet, blame that same internet for the decay of social networks in the phenomenon we so tellingly capitalize as Real Life. I pooh-pooh the fretting, because I love the new opportunities: keeping up with former students, tracking the growth of my niece and nephew. It pleases me to be able to determine where I’ve seen that actor on that show before, with just a few key taps, or to fact check (and verify) the assertion that Lupita Nyong’o looks gorgeous in every color she wears. I like having my reach extended, beaming messages to old friends who belong, in my personal cosmos, to the distant galaxy known as elementary school.
Much has been made of the way the internet brings out the worst in us, for instance through flame wars, cyber-bullying, and derogatory “bashtags.” Here, I share the concerns. So often, I see posts and articles whose gist is “I have no sympathy for so-and-so.” Much of the time I see reason for withholding fellow feeling, whether from well-heeled individuals raising tantrums over the fraying of their privileges or from vicious killer on death row. Still I find myself reflecting on the suspension of sympathy and its role in the actions of the wrongdoers just mentioned.
Flinging put-downs on the internet is a seductive business. We get the excitement of confronting others’ behavior without all the consequences and risks. Particularly aggravating for me is the anti-immigrant screed. Such messages often appear in the second person, accusing some unidentified “you” of parasitical laziness.
These postings, I admit, spark the urge for reciprocal bad behavior on my part. Are you saying that our immigrant elders (mine and others’)–whose language learning suffered because they washed for, cooked for, cleaned up after, scolded, and cared for entire extended families, serving as one-man or one-woman safety nets–who worked multiple jobs to bankroll the education of a highly skilled and often seamlessly bilingual new generation–now need to “Press 2 to hang up and learn English”?
Come over and say that to me here.
If anything, though, my internet anger raises my awareness of my own fundamental trolldom. Like many others, I suspect, I tend toward an ingrained defensiveness that I’ve nurtured for a long time–probably since my first-hand experiences of how young people do also say terrible things to each other on a face-to-face level. Some days, no provocation is too small to stir the troll in me.
Yesterday I was standing at a corner where a tiny side street meets bustling San Pablo. The walk sign there takes forever to come on. As I was waiting, a woman strode up and forcefully jabbed three or four times at the button, when I had ALREADY PRESSED IT! Look at her folding her arms smugly, as if in expectation of instant success. Does she think she knows some better way than I do of pressing a walk button? Another 45 seconds of DON’T WALK will wipe that self-satisfied smile from her face.
Forty-five seconds did go by, with her aplomb undiminished. Then we crossed the street and started walking up the same steep hill. “That’s a cute dog,” she said to me, pointing to a fluffy white pooch walking by on a leash. Then she said the same thing to the tall woman walking the dog and gave the animal a friendly pat. Geez, what’s wrong with you, I asked my troll, getting so worked up about a perfectly pleasant stranger? My inner troll just shrugged at me and headed back under my inner bridge.
Hostility, says the troll. It’s what I do.
That’s just one example of an unseen flare-up in me of old feelings. On the other hand, here’s something new. Once every few days, usually peering at budding trees outside a window, over the shoulder of a student writer, during silent moments when the student needs to skirmish with the structure of a hard-to-structure sentence, I experience a shiver of unaccountable joy. I feel that I’m where I am supposed to be, that everything is right. And it’s true. I am doing what I dreamed of doing when I was in my 20s, a mix of teaching, writing, and art making–and actually the art making is more than I had even dared to dream. So the feeling’s not surprising, but its piercing sweetness is.
The euphoria has to do simply with being present, in a way that cannot be synthesized, even as our electronic devices deliver streams of positive and negative reinforcement that are, I do believe, rewiring our brains. Spelling, for instance, is in genuine peril, mark my words. Many students right-click two or three times a sentence to turn anylisis into analysis or–if they’re not careful–into analities. They’re not memorizing the words, but they’re going to have to cut down on the clicking, or they won’t be able to make deadlines. It’ll be like getting stuck at the endless DON’T WALK sign every day of their lives.
Still, I’m holding out hope for books and for swivel chairs, as well as for late nights and cold pizza, with the electronic universe as a powerful complement to–but not a substitute for–our breathing lives.