Sharmaine E.DS. Browne | 30 October 2019

“Well you need to fall into line because that’s how it’s done now.” I need to fall int-?  I was stunned.

Van, a fairly new acquaintance, was talking about tech, specifically, texting, more specifically, my failure to respond to each and every text he sent, which was occasionally every fifteen minutes, for an hour at a time, and nearly every day for stretches at a time. Sometimes, when I failed to respond because I was out or at work or on the subway, a dialogue would develop without me; he would write, wait for a little while, answer his own inquiry, then text again, and so on, a script.

 

It wasn’t that I didn’t respond at all, just that I failed to respond to every text he sent. I always responded about plans we had or whatever personal crises might be brewing, though it seemed to me, if a longer communication was in order, then so was a meeting or a phone call, but he didn’t roll that way. And if I didn’t respond to the little electronic tugs at my shirtsleeve all day, as I tried to go about my day, buying fruit at the little grocery, sipping a coffee in my favorite café, checking out a book at the library, browsing for books at the local bookstore, chatting with my neighbor on the stoop, or having a drink with friends at our local watering hole, it was because I preferred living in my days – not alongside them in some digital multiverse.

The incessant rings and buzzes disturbed my peace of mind, frazzled my nerves after a while, and interrupted whatever flow I managed to catch through the days. Since everyone had begun cultivating these invisible, electric attachments, I tried to be careful to keep my irritation to myself. I was sympathetic. I’d had developed my own digital attachments via email a few years prior, and by telephone some years before that, and the addictive qualities had been powerful.

There is something special and sometimes secretive about a correspondence. It’s a space in which you not only communicate but also cultivate a unique and creative manner of textual bounce with someone else. The problem was, I find such technological bonds pulled me out of the world I was in and into one of my shared mind with another. I worked hard to rid myself of the habit. Once I did, like a former smoker, I simply did not want to be pulled back in. I felt I had a right to my time and my days and the rhythms of life I had worked so hard to cultivate, so I tried to explain when chastised. I also tried to head off future conflicts by announcing that I unplugged when I traveled and certainly over summers, but that excuse held some people off for only so long.

One winter, it reached a breaking point with one friend. The weather was bitter cold though not yet snowing, and I was leaving for Spain, anxious to escape the doldrums of my job, happy to put as much distance between myself and it as possible. I was moving slowly. The doctors had cut into me, through skin and muscle, and had made a mistake. The new pain was intense. Even sitting up was an effort. Red called and offered to help me pack. She and three other friends came over and put a month’s supply of life in a suitcase and we laughed, though it hurt, and had a good time overall. We made blue cheese sandwiches with pears, listened to the Boss in honor of the East Coast, took silly pictures, and sat around watching the cats. Another friend took me to the airport where a wheelchair was waiting, which I stubbornly declined out of some sense of displaced pride. So I made my way slowly and somewhat painfully instead, my head heavy with thoughts and wondering how I got there, in life, weighed down by the events of a decade.

It was one of those omen-filled journeys, there and back, a time for healing, but also a time of enormous transition which I tried to deal with as gracefully as possible, but probably failed miserably, though that’s a different story. In any case, I had my thoughts full, dreaming, discarding, cleaning house. Familiar with my need for space, most of my friends let me be, knowing they would see me a month or two out, and might call me on the phone to chat, but ceased texting out of respect for time and money. Not Van.

Within days, he began texting, dramatic texts like ominous tweets, “it’s gone,” or “it’s over,” or “alone now,” without context or conversation, without identification or explanation, little hooks meant to draw me and inquire or attend. I called him the first night I received a little script of bits, left a message, but he didn’t call back, just persisted in the hooks the next day, to which I in fact couldn’t respond while in a meeting. I called him back again. He didn’t answer. For my own reasons, I didn’t want to lock into the little screen, so I didn’t text. Late that night, I received several more dramatic notes without context, and finally called a mutual friend to find out what was going on. He filled me in. There had been some drama. So I called one last time, out of a sense of responsibility and empathy, left a message, heard nothing, tried calling one more time, heard nothing, and then went on with my month. As far as I know, he didn’t text again, or if he did they’d been lost, and I had far too much going on in my life, and others around me had far too much going on with theirs, to pursue a silence punctuated by tiny scripts from a close but definite acquaintance from thousands of miles away.

We had never really gotten to know each other very well, but his texts had become a daily event for over a year by then. What I found most astonishing about them was their lack of psychic regard for another’s day or preoccupations. It was as though he couldn’t imagine another life or mind outside his own, that we were all magically there and available for his time, and specifically, his space. If we weren’t in his space, and he rarely left his basement apartment or his computer, then we weren’t doing anything at all; our being was non-being in his imagination’s cyberspace.

I recently heard that there is something about that in Deleuze — that there are those who cannot imagine the unfolding of life of another not themselves, that it doesn’t exist for them. It’s a challenge for most of us anyway, to really center ourselves in another’s perspective, and fix it, if just for a moment, but for some it may be impossible entirely, or so it seems. It’s some combination of empathy and imagination and a kind of intellectual selflessness that’s needed. Without that chemical, emotional, and imaginative combination, these folks imagine you are there just for them, somehow, and nobody else exists, not one’s friends or family or lovers, let alone one’s self, life and feeling. The illusion of the Top Dog.

In Van’s case, his inability to imagine another’s life could well have been a fracture in his perception. Could it be that the technology provides a medium to watch our pathologies play out? Could the technology simply reflect the ups and the dips, the swings in mood without the filter of another’s face offering a reflection of the behaviors? I’m empathetic. I’m familiar with feelings of isolation and confusion, and we all know the times when a kind of desperation for understanding takes hold.

But, what interests me, what frightens me, is that I’ve watched the technology turn into a leash for some and in both directions. We appear to be most vulnerable when life isn’t going well.  Anyone who is feeling slightly off-kilter, a little sad, somewhat isolated, or just incapacitated by circumstances or illness seems vulnerable. It has me thinking about the larger implications of the texting technologies in the world at large. For every impulse, the technology is there to satisfy it—if we feel sad, we text; if we feel frustrated, we text; if we feel confused, we text, and texts want an immediate response. This doesn’t leave a lot of time for rumination, contemplation or self-examination. Moreover, due to the distance, geographical and emotional, the absence of another tangible voice or face, our ability to ignore the effect of our words on our audience, the technology seems to amplify the feelings of the sender while cutting off the feelings of the receiver; dialogues become monologues. The empathetic line, the reciprocity, is lost.

As we strive to be open, we become insensitive ourselves—because when we don’t have to see the effects of our words on someone else, we very well may formulate communications less thoughtfully or considerately. Instead of measuring our words, we blurt them. Instead of considering the listener, we hold them hostage to our needs. Being on the other end of an emotive communication which fails to consider our being-in-the world has become increasingly difficult. Texting separates us. It also controls us.

To me, texts can begin to feel like small tugs, demanding time, demanding attention, and demanding response. And when I haven’t responded, sometimes, the texts intensify, becoming stronger and stronger tugs, until they’ve grabbed my shirt, and twisted it behind me, again and again, tighter and tighter, until what I have left behind is choking me.

Also, texting leaves us with very little privacy. People know how long we might take to consider a meeting, or they know whether or not we are busy or free, presumably anyway, and we no longer have the freedom of our own space and time to think – to ruminate – to just get away from the world for a while without it feeling like a deliberate decision. Each and every text asks us to answer it or not. Texts don’t let us be.

And what’s sad, really sad, is that what it means to be a good friend to someone is losing its resonance amidst the cacophony of ringtones and message alerts. When I returned to New York City, freeze and storms, the sidewalks were icy and the wind was biting cold. I emerged from the bookstore, it was late, and as I looked across the square to the street where we often met for a beer just two doors from his building, I called and left a message; I was in the neighborhood and back from Spain if he wanted to hang out.

I began walking downtown and had walked two and half long, wintry blocks when the text came in. “im sorry i dont think i can c u again.” I stared at it for a moment, cold fingers beginning to clutch at my guts in either anger or hurt, unclear to me. I texted back, “huh?” “ive texted u and u havent responded. u obviously dont want to be friends u r not a good friend.” “huh? I just called you. I just got back.” He began to text long messages, bleeping on and on, I stood there trapped at the top of the subway stairs in the cold to avoid losing the signal, thinking to myself and unsure what to do as I heard my phone buzz with the alerts. I didn’t go down into the tunnel but went to wait for the bus instead—another aspect of these kinds of digital communications which few people take into account, the ways they disrupt the most basic aspects of our lives.

When I looked down again, a few minutes later, I responded to a text I saw there, confused, bummed, and somewhat irritated. I texted that if he needed to talk he needed to call me. I called, but he didn’t answer. I texted that I didn’t want to have a serious conversation over text screens. I asked him to call. I heard nothing. I rode the bus home.

After exiting the bus, I walked through the cold to my door feeling sad and a little ill. I was thinking about the ill feeling in my guts, my guilt, my friend’s accusations as I was taking off my boots, the snow melting onto the wood, while I was pulling off my coat, shivering, walking over to turn up the thermostat, as I was making cocoa. There was no feeling of warmth or comfort. I didn’t get to enjoy the heat or my cocoa. There was no welcome upon returning home—only accusations. I remembered the days before digital—when friends were excited when I returned from a trip, and when I was excited to see them when they came home from a trip. I began singing softly, “Those days are gone my friend, we’d thought they’d never end, we’d sing and dance, forever and a day ….”

The screen alert and ringtone were silent until two o’clock in the morning when scrolls of texts started pouring in again. Exasperated, and getting angry, I ignored them and called. This time he answered. I told him that serious conversations should not be had via text, and he flung angry accusations at me, hard and fast, all of which were specious and somewhat invented. It was drama I didn’t need, nor want. He read from the standard script – I wasn’t a good friend because I hadn’t stayed in touch during my vacation. I told him that I felt suffocated because it seemed he wanted me on call for him, that my time was in fact his time. There was no room in his rule book for anyone to fall or wander out of range.

I was tired of feeling that this most normal possibility in years past, close enough in time to easily remember, just falling off the map for a little while, was considered a violation of friendship, never mind one’s needs. The conversation went poorly for about fifteen minutes—and then he berated me for neglecting my best friend. My best friend? It was out before I could stop it. “I’ve barely known you a year?!” I said. But it was then that I realized that he had no conception at all of my life outside his tiny and narrow experience of it. My world only existed within the limits of what he could imagine, a tiny slice of his life was the entirety of mine—to him. My presence in that slice was my life. His texts were everything. I lived inside of them, being a good friend by responding, or being a bad one by not responding.

Later that year, I would meet with an old boyfriend from college while in California with whom I spent many nights up the coast or afternoons wandering the beach, phoneless, back then, and free in so many more ways than now. We were walking his dog through Santa Cruz discussing my interest in communication technology, and it was he who pointed out we were able to disappear back then and come home to roommates who had already started the bbq, unruffled that we couldn’t be reached. “Where were you guys?” “At the beach.” The answer sufficed. No more. My nostalgia runs deep.

A year later, I had another collision with a man who was fully plugged in every way, who could not tolerate being alone for even an hour without logging onto social media or texting someone. I hadn’t seen him in many years, and whatever correspondence I did have with him usually consisted of a brief request for some kind of advice—and was always accompanied by some snarky remark about how difficult I was to reach. In fact, it was not difficult to reach me at all by the old standard. Were someone to call me one morning and leave me a message, they could easily expect and receive a callback that night, or at the latest, over the next day or two if I was really busy. But that old standard no longer applies. The pace and peace of communication is no longer slow or measured, no longer glassy and smooth. It’s fixed by a staccato beat and rapid fire responses, brief, unpunctuated and immediate. One no longer really has time to think, or even time for one’s self.

I had lived on the other coast for years and had just returned the week before. For the week and a half since my return, each of my days had been peppered with little tweets of texts from him. At first, I chalked the abundance of texts to excitement that I was in town. We met for a drink, and in person, I had a lovely time. The next morning, he texted, “i miss u mama!” Feeling stupid, I wondered how he could miss me? We just saw each other. “It was good to see you too,” I responded. But when the “cant wait 2 c u”s and the “miss u mama”s and the “i luv u”s began rolling through my days, I began to feel overwhelmed. I watched the texts roll in over the course of days, curious, perplexed, and flummoxed. I wondered if he ever wanted time to himself.

He invited me to come over to his house for dinner and to see his new house, a meeting that was overdue, and I agreed, but he wanted me to meet him at work first. He shared these aspects of his life, rolled it out for me, and that was fine. He had a good job, a professional position that adhered to a traditional nine to five schedule, unlike mine as a teacher, or my colleagues—artists and intellectuals who work, if not outside the grid, then aside its timetables. But he didn’t ask about my job, in fact, had never asked what I do at all, and had no sense of it.

Instead, he wanted me to embrace a lifestyle I had worked hard to avoid, routine and safely contained, suburban and local. I could feel the insistence, the psychic weight pushing at me to like his condo in a gated community, to be impressed and to want to be involved. He showed so little interest in who I was while insisting I celebrate his choices. I have since wondered if, to some extent, I was simply offended by his lack of attentiveness or inquiries. I began to realize he hadn’t the faintest ideas about my beliefs or interests, my passions or my tendencies, never mind my work. At some point I realized we barely knew each other. The tech had kept us divided as strangers.

He texted me several times during the day on a Sunday, and I replied once saying that I had work to do, that … I’d let him know if I had time in the evening. He texted again late in the afternoon, and I told him I didn’t think I’d be able to meet. My work was unfinished, and I had a deadline.

I thought to myself at the time, I realize, now, though, he has little idea of what I do, and hasn’t the faintest notion about what it entails. In his world of getting up and out the door to his official corporate job, writing, research, and even teaching isn’t work at all. My time is free time in his mind. He followed up with three more texts of increasing intensity and vulgarity, a little less than ten minutes apart, all imploring me to come to his house, and I finally texted him that if I were up for going out, I had coffee or pool in mind, not going over to his house an hour away. But in any case, I didn’t want to go out at all. I wanted to finish my work.

After a few minutes, a new slew of text messages started flowing in, a rapid succession of cajoling, teasing, irritating, and offending messages, and with every alert, I found myself becoming increasingly tense as I tried to concentrate. After half a dozen more texts, all of which I honestly didn’t see at first because there were so many, I responded, simply, “nope.” A couple more texts of disappointed sentiments and “awwww” followed, then followed by a fifteen minute pause.

Then, another half dozen or more cajoling texts followed a while later, and ten minutes after my final, “no,” I got one more punctuated message, “so then when will i c u?” to which I, admittedly, became just totally exasperated. I took a breath, remembered compassionate communication, and asked myself, “what does he need?” I texted back, “what is going on with you? Are you okay?” There was no response, so I texted a “?” to which I received no response again, and so I called, and I asked him again. He was unresponsive, clearly disappointed in my response, and admittedly, amidst the awkward pause and silence, I felt bad, realizing I had put him on the spot. He declined to have a conversation, assured me that everything was fine, and I went back to work.

The next morning I received another text; he had sent me a letter on FB. Facebook? Seriously?!?!? Now, granted, I have a peculiar aversion to writing serious letters on FB as well as text screens, but I swallowed my aversion, and calmly read it, and thought a lot about what he had to say in it all day. I really, really believe that letters of a certain gravitas should be read carefully and that a response should take time. As I was mulling it over, and falling asleep that night, another text came in that he hoped I had read his letter. I could have responded, and maybe I should have, but I was tired and thought that a morning response would be okay, and reasonable. When I woke up late, however, I had ten more texts sent around six o’clock in the morning.

It would be hard to accurately describe my reaction to those break-of-dawn texts. They hurt in a number of ways, leaving many colors of bruises on my feelings, on my sense of self, on my ego—but especially on my good intentions, the patience and effort I had exerted the past two weeks to tolerate what I felt was extreme, unreasonable, and immature behavior, — to look past my own very palpable judgments, and to assess my own reactions as somewhat shallow and perhaps premature. Looking at it, of course it was my fault to a large extent; I should not have exerted such effort, and I should have made my feelings even more clear, but truly, I was trying to be polite, and trying to get past my own sense of irritation and at times dismay over these conflicting communications. And I really had been open to spending more time with him, but I needed some time, and I needed to take some time. I had been lonely myself, and I welcomed the companionship, but I was ill-prepared for what seemed like a demand for a complete collapse of boundaries.

Suffice to say, things didn’t end well, but looking back at it, it was the texting, the availability of the medium, and the expectations harnessed to that tech, immediacy of response, accessibility, perpetual perceptual mis-readings, which cost us whatever friendship we might have maintained. An aggressive person in life, persistent and dogged in his desires and demands, the technology answered to his every impulse, and his own frustration built then blew when the human pulse on the other side of that digital leash wasn’t there and available on his schedule, compliant and responsive On Demand; my number was a premium channel with its own life and mind.

I’m not arguing that technology is bad, but I am noticing that technology provides us with an instantaneous outlet for every neurosis, every mental tick, every emotional need on call, and this is a problem. It amplifies needs, pathologies, and feelings. It can blind us, or, it can create an echo chamber in which every response we think we hear is in fact one of our own making.

Whether or not you believe in ruminating or taking your time with a thought or a feeling, the pause that the nature of time is always generous enough to offer often opens up into reflection. Anger cools, forgiveness blossoms, desire evens out, excitement finds a rhythm. But too, the quiet silence, the time of reflection, allows another to take in what we want or need, to slosh it around, and figure out how to respond, how we want to respond.

Like it or not, technology affects human interaction and not always for the better, maybe often for the worse. The way we use it is customized to our own particular needs, peculiarities, issues, personalities, and yes, even mental or emotional disturbances. As a leash, it yanks others down into whatever hole we’re falling into with us, and that simply, is just, no good.