(first part is here)
The four of us are in a Life3601 group. “Does it ever bother you that your Mom, and Nonni and me, always know where you are?”
“No. I mean, if I thought she was stalking me, or trying to control where I go... But she trusts me. She knows I’m not going to go places I shouldn’t.”
Trust. My Mom told me one time, in my late teens, that she and Dad had to trust that they’d done a good enough job of raising us that when we went out we wouldn’t do things that would get us hurt or in trouble.
Josie and I are talking about how she manages her phone, how she manages a life where all of her relationships are always on, so different from the world I grew up in.
“I’m not going to pry for specifics, but do you have any big secrets that you keep from your Mom?”
She thinks about it. “No, not really. I tell her pretty much everything.”
“And do you think that’s typical for people your age?”
“The people I hang out with? Pretty much. People my age in general? Maybe half and half.”
My Mom and I were always close, the spring leading up to my 19th summer in particular. She was taking classes at Fox Valley2 as well, working on her bachelor’s degree in education and several days each week our class schedules meshed and we’d drive over together. I was taking a creative writing class, an art appreciation class that had a huge impact on me, piano, music theory. I read William James Varieties of Religious Experience, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. We’d talk philosophy and literature while we had sandwiches in the little cafeteria. I’m sure we were closer and shared more than most nineteen year old men and their mothers in our little Wisconsin town.
But there were huge chunks of my realities that I told her nothing about. The studious nerd that she knew was certainly genuine and she saw some of the guitar player. Surely she assumed I was sexually active and suspected I was dabbling in drugs (small town America in 1975), but she wouldn’t have guessed the degree of promiscuity, the daily marijuana, frequent psychedelics, occasional pills and those few experiments with narcotics. She’d told me more than once that there were things about my life she didn’t need to know. Whatever she might imagine I was doing or not doing she had to rely on trust and hope to keep at bay the fear that I’d end up doing things that would upend my life, or end it altogether.
Marian is involved in every aspect of Josie’s life. The immediacy of their contact still startles me, that we’ll be discussing something and she says, “Let me ask my Mom” and she grabs her phone and does and Marian responds. As if one of them is just chiming into the conversation from the other room. It’s always on.
But their reality belies the helicoptering stereotype. Ever since Josie was small I’ve watched her Mom carefully, insistently, push her beyond her comfort zone. We were at a friend’s house one afternoon, just the three of us, to use the pool. Josie was learning to swim, wailing and crying that she couldn’t do it, couldn’t get all the way to the other side. Her Mom insisted. I would’ve given in, but “Mommy makes the rules” and I stayed quiet, aching with Josie’s tears. She slapped her hand on the far wall and burst into a smile, her Mom gathered her up in a towel telling her how wonderful she is. Both of them proud and delighted. Good thing it wasn’t up to me.
In toddler gymnastics, Josie excelled. And I’d see the same thing when they were at our house and Josie was conditioning. She’s doing splits and stretches and there’s more whimpering and wailing that it hurts, that she can’t do it, but her Mom won’t give in. I ache for the kid’s misery but I’ve learned to trust the Mom. I see that she never pushes the kid beyond what she can do, but never lets her get away with less than she’s capable of. And Josie responds to the pressure. It’s clear that’s what she needs. Parallel to the push, there’s always the reality check – are you sure this is what you want to do? And Marian seems to know just where the line is. It’s a mystery to me, but she’s always had a magic touch with children.
I’ve watched her calm screaming babies on airplanes, find the missing toddler at DisneyWorld just before the mother goes into full-blown panic, gently push and prod the special needs child to do more than the parent knew they could, back when she was managing her Gymboree or coaching toddler gymnastics. In the late 1990s she and I did some duet gigs, me on acoustic guitar and both of us on vocals. The year we played a summer festival in the little Alabama town where she was going to college, we walked across the grounds to the stage and I swear every person under three feet tall in the place came running up to her, Mimi! Mimi! It happens to her even now when she runs into a kid, now a high school or college student, or a parent of one, who thanks her for what she did for the child was back when. I came to understand that Marian sees babies and toddlers and small children as fully formed human beings, albeit with little experience and limited musculoskeletal development. She takes them seriously, tunes into their brightness, and has a fine sense of how much more capable small kids are than most adults appreciate, how much they are aware of, how much they are affected by attention and neglect. To watch Marian with Josie was a flower of mysteries unfolding and blooming.
Marian taught her about “restaurant voice” before she could talk. We had some favorites, places where we were known, where they probably would’ve put up with more rambunctiousness from the kid, but Marian wouldn’t allow it. It astonished me how the toddler would start to fuss and Marian would put her hand on the table, lean in and whisper “restaurant voice” and Josie’s volume would drop. “I didn’t know you could do that with little kids!” I’d say. Marian would laugh at my ignorance.
Family dinners at our house were always at the dining room table, always nice tableware. Conversation involved all of us. After the meal, if she got bored, she might go to the living room to play. She’d appear engrossed in her trains or her books or her little castles but I knew she was always listening and observing. Once in a while I’d catch her eye and the glances would say that she knew that I knew that she knew. As time passed, and we got our phones, they were not allowed at the table.
Josie’s had a fraught relationship with her Dad, who she did not meet until after her fourth birthday. Then it was every other weekend at his house and he was adamant about “his time”. The Court insisted that he allow her to go to her gymnastics meets, which he grudgingly accepted, but in the narrowest terms. We were in Atlanta on one of his weekends. Nonni and I had agreed to drive her to his house near Birmingham after the meet on Saturday because her Mom had to stay over to coach on Sunday morning. But when the time came, Josie wanted to stay that one more night to watch the next morning’s competitions. She pleaded with her Mom to make her Dad say yes. But M said, “You’re going to have to be the one to ask him.” More pleading. More Mom standing her ground. So she did, and of course he said no, insisting that this was “family time” and he’d already given up a day. It’s a three hour drive. She whimpered in the back seat for a while, then was quiet and I’d watch her bereft face, anguished in the rearview. We pulled into the driveway after dark. Nonni asked if she wanted one of us to walk her to the door. “No, I got this.” She got out of the car, settled her backpack, took a deep breath. She got to the door and we could see her paste her smile on just before she rang the bell. I’d seen that move before. She was two weeks shy of eleven.
Hillary was right when she said “it takes a village”. Josie was four and increasingly curious about family arrangements. This was just before her Dad entered her life. “So Kai has a Mommy and a Daddy,” she said thoughtfully one time when I was strapping her into her car seat, referencing one of her friends. “Well, I’ve got a Mommy and a Nonni and a Nonai and a Queenie and Bispo3... I’ve got lots of ‘em!” She had great counselors in daycare, great coaches, excellent teachers in her first several years of school. She knows that the unhappy relationship with her Dad has had a negative impact (e.g., in her conflict avoidance), but says she doesn’t feel damaged by it. She always had so many smart and caring adults around to rely on.
Nobody is guaranteed a healthy happy life and so often parents try to do everything right and their kids still suffer. In her wonderfully sane and pragmatic newsletter Technosapiens, Jackie Nesi points out that it’s teens who are already struggling in social situations, already engaging in risky behavior, already wrestling with emotional issues who are more likely to have problems with social media and what they encounter online. It’s the totality of how children are treated, the context within which their phone use takes place that gets lost when we demonize those little pocket computers. I think often of a bored little boy we saw one day in a restaurant, sad face illumined by the glow from his dad’s phone as he leans against the man’s shoulder. A little while ago he was happily engaged in conversation with the four adults at the table, but one by one they turned their attention to their phones, making it quite clear to him what their priorities are.
We’re coming to the end of the summer. Next week she’ll move into her first apartment.
“It seems to me that people my age don’t spend enough time listening to people your age.”4
“No, they don’t,” she says, her voice flat and firm.
If we did, we might be less arrogant with our presumptions.
She is comfortable in her world in a way that I never could be, but I understand it a little better now. Hers is an immediacy that is alien to me. The people she loves are never more than a fingertap away. Same with her favorite stores. Like the fish who knows nothing of water, she moves through the online eddies and turbulence at ease in her element. I need a wetsuit and extra tanks of air.
The constraints of time and space that were fundamental for me have been breached. The ways that we acquire and organize and accumulate knowledge have been exploded, turned inside out. For all of recorded history prior to the 1990s, information was stored in physical objects, its storage and retrieval determined by the limitations of the physical world. Think of a library as a nest of systems designed to keep track of the location and movement of those physical embodiments of information, its catalogs and indexes describing, sometimes minutely, but never completely, the information each object contains. The Sumerian scribes started it, figuring out how to arrange the clay tablets on which they noted the season’s beer production. Over centuries people developed fabulous systems, but until the 20th century none of our brilliant inventions could eliminate the need to physically go to where a document or record was, or figure out how to have it brought to you.5
I’ve been reading Flannery O’Connor’s letters to A. Late 1950s. Rural Georgia. Much of their correspondence involves sending books and copies of articles back and forth, querying librarians about whether such and such a volume is available. In one letter, O’Connor tells A that she’s sending along an article that another friend had sent her – she’s sure he wouldn’t mind. A letter or two later she’s reminding A to send it back and we read between the lines that he may have minded after all. Each copy was precious. My own files from the ‘70s and ‘80s are stuffed with articles torn from magazines or photocopied at ten cents a page.
In the unbound6 of the digital world those of us who grew up only (or merely mostly) in the world of things sputter and gasp in the flood. The algorithms sweep us into new streams supposedly connected to other streams we’ve been in, but this doesn’t give us what we need, and the tools and systems that we’ve so finely honed to give us mastery in the physical world are mostly useless. How did we get here? What do we do? How can we tame the flood? Thirty-five years of the World Wide Web, fifty years after conceptualizing the internet, and we’re still struggling with how to come to grips with its strangeness.
So I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on those who focus on the loss, who create an idealized fantasy of the paradise of childhood back before phones, when children played freely in the neighborhood, walked to the corner grocery store by themselves, took the streetcar on their own, learning resilience and the skills for solving their own problems. They’ve neatly excised the memories of the isolation, abuse, and loneliness that were very much the reality for just as many kids in those days. They struggle to develop good habits for their own phone use and when they fail and their kids emulate their behaviors they blame the phones, and do what they can to keep them out of the hands of “the children”. Taking the phone away from a struggling kid is a poor band aid; taking the phones away from all kids, because some are struggling is foolish. It sadly reminds me of the Moms for Liberty attacking school and public libraries in the forlorn hope of protecting their children's "innocence" by keeping them ignorant of the magnificently terrifying realities of sex and gender. As if they could prop up the angel of history and stand fast against the terrible strangeness of this world. And when those kids finally do gain access to the coveted device, won’t they be eager to explore every forbidden nook and crook and cranny of this fabulously strange world they’ve been barred from their entire life.
It’s not strange for Josie. The phone’s not compelling – it’s too familiar. Mundane. This is the way the world’s always been. Her phone’s a handy device for connecting her to the world, but nothing special. When I started the project I wanted to learn how she moves back and forth between the physical world and the digital. I’ve come to understand that she doesn’t see that dichotomy at all. She is firmly rooted in the physical world. The phone lets her expand that world, make it bigger and more interconnected. But her big issues are the same ones people have always faced. Living on her own is challenging and exciting, relationships are hard, heartbreak is inevitable, joy blooms when you least expect it, the future is a mystery. She’d like one day to have a job she enjoys, some kids, a nice house. She says she has days when if she doesn't stay focused on what's right in front of her "my head would explode". The usual stuff. Not strange at all.
An app that enable members of the group to track the others’ movements. Actually, you’re tracking where the phone is – which, of course, is nearly the same thing.
The 2-year university extension campus near us.
Our best friends, who assumed the roles of additional grandparents.
When I say “my age” I’m including people several decades younger. It’s hard for me to internalize how old I am. Josie and I’ve stopped referring to the labelled generations. She sees too many differences between herself and people even five years older to feel that “Generation Z” describes anything meaningful.
From the middle of the 20th century, radio and television began to shift the paradigm, but storage and preservation still required a physical medium.
I will be forever grateful to Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness for blowing my mind with the image of the unbound in the Library’s basement bindery.