My n of 1 settles into the big chair. Smiles around her eyes, eager for whatever comes next. Not that different from those years ago when she was three and four and five. I'd hear them, she and her Mom, the red Sorento pulling up in the driveway below my window, our front door opening and closing. She'd briefly say hello to Nonni and then she'd appear in my study. It has always been her room as much as mine. She knows where everything is.
Some months ago, I posted an essay that tried to capture something of the character of the world in which she lives, how she manages the swirling torrent of unbound information. I’d become fascinated by her apparently healthy and sane relationship with her phone, which seems so contrary to the conventional fussing about kids and screens. Partly in jest, I decided to design a summer research project – how is it that she manages to be so well-adjusted? I sketched out a mock proposal:
Concerns about rising levels of mental illness among teens, particularly young women, have led to increasingly strident calls to limit smartphone access by children and teens. While the statistics are indeed cause for concern, there has been little attention paid to the overwhelming majority of young people who are not experiencing these negative effects. This project seeks to use one reasonably well adjusted college sophomore (and their circle of friends) as a case study for how they are curating the nonstop bombardment of information that characterizes contemporary society.
I hired Josie. She is both research assistant and research subject. My n of 1.1
She comes over two afternoons a week, picks up lunch along the way. A sandwich from the Publix deli, or a salad bowl from Cava, or sushi from our favorite Japanese place. Sometimes it’s a fast food sandwich and fries. She knows places I’ve never heard of. While we eat I lay out the day’s plan. She helps me with chores too difficult for me to manage in my crippled condition. Keeps Sam’s food and water dispensers full, tends to his litter box. Maybe a load of laundry, takes out my trash. Keeps my coffee pods and breakfast biscuits organized. She likes precision. She likes arranging things. She has a fine esthetic sense.
She spends some of the time with the ongoing project of cataloging my 50 years of handwritten journals.2 She tapes a tag to each physical volume, giving the inclusive dates. That becomes the title of record in LibraryThing. Sometime in the early 2000s I started listing, on the first page of each, the cities I’d taken that volume to. She includes that in the notes.
The rest of the afternoon goes to the research project.
Certain things seem to be empirically true. I’m trying to understand how they weave together.
She is, to all appearances, a well-adjusted, mentally healthy young adult. Good grades, active social life. Describes herself as “optimistic. A good friend.”
Her phone is always within reach – she tells me, when I ask, that her screentime app informs her she picks it up some 236 times a day.
I never feel, when we’re together, that I don’t have her full attention, despite her glances and occasional taps at her phone.
I give her assignments. Things to read and respond to, that we can use as jumping off points for conversation as I try to see the world as she sees it. An essay from a young woman in England who’s nostalgic for a past she thinks the smart phone robbed her of. The Surgeon General’s editorial arguing for social media warning labels. The Pew study about how bad people are at distinguishing fact statements from opinion statements. I put the assignments up in a Google doc. She makes some notes. And then we talk. My job is to listen, although inevitably I do most of the talking (she is the most patient person I know).
She was finding her way around my iPad when she was five. She got her first phone when she was seven. So how has she avoided the damage that the pearl-clutchers claim these devices are inflicting on “the children”?
Turns out she has rules. Norms developed over years. We decide that her final project for the summer will be some TikTok-ish videos in which she shares some of these rules with an imaginary thirteen or fourteen year old, someone who might not be as optimistic, self-aware, and socially adept as she is. She settled on four.
Think Before You Post
Unlike Josie, who was born into it, those of us raised in the world of things were unprepared for the online world. We knew about counting to ten before you spoke in anger. We all knew the regret from making a remark that was far more cutting than intended, and now couldn’t be taken back. “Some things are better left unsaid” – a bromide we all knew, regardless of how difficult for some of us to put into practice. Some of us, at least, had experienced the sick feeling of wishing we hadn’t sent that letter after all, dreading the moment when he or she would read it, wondering if there would be anything we could do to make it right. If we hadn’t done it ourselves, we knew it as a plot device from novels and movies.
None of that prepared us, in the nineties, for the immediacy of e-mail or the permanent, public nature of it. We didn’t understand how easy it was to send our snarky comment about one of our colleagues to an entire email list rather than just to the one friend it was intended for. We didn’t yet realize that the Internet was forever. We didn’t know about tone, about how easy it was to miss irony and satire, how dumb our own cleverness could make us look to others.
Our norms emerged slowly, out of painful experience. “Never put anything in an email that you wouldn’t be willing to see on the front page of the New York Times.” One of my favorites. Seemed impossible for most of us to adhere to. We couldn’t close the gap between believing that our private messages were, well, private, and the reality that they are not.3 Our social norms were formed in the world of things and were inadequate.
But our stumbles with email were nothing compared to the brutality that social media encourages. How did it get so ugly so fast? What happened to the promise? Do you remember those years when we believed in the wisdom of the crowd? When elevating the voices of the voiceless was going to usher in a golden age of true democracy?
Josie doesn’t. In our fascination with the new shiny thing we didn’t see the thorns. Josie’s sight is much clearer, her armor buffed and polished.
In her video, she makes it personal. “Has someone ever done you dirty on social media?” The impulse is to immediately unleash your own fury back at them. “Don’t do it!” She says. She is emphatic. Not that it may come back to “bite you in the butt”; it will. At least sleep on it, she says. It’ll look different in the morning. You’ll feel differently. Her conclusion surprises me (as do many of her conclusions). “Maybe go talk to the person in person”. I thought she was going to talk about the nastiness that people turn on the people they don’t know; but when I asked, very early in the project how she dealt with online toxicity, she made a disgusted face. “I don’t like it. I swipe past.”
She knows that it's only the people that you have real relationships with that can hurt you. Those are the ones you need to tend to. The ones who don’t know you can be ignored.
Set Time Limits
“Scotty! Time to come down out of the tree!”
That would be my Mom calling me in for dinner. In the back yard of our house on the Island was a huge maple tree, and one of my favorite spots for reading was high up where the branches combined to make a comfortable (enough) seat. I suppose I was seven, eight, nine when I’d retreat there after school, or afternoons in the summer. There was never enough time for reading.
People who don’t read much have always been suspicious of those who do. In a 16th century Italian dialogue, one friend chides another,
Will you ever allow yourself to desist from turning your pages day and night, day after day? What sweet friendship do these books of yours offer that you spend your time with them and become pale, exhausted, consumed, poor, and sickly?4
Josie says she spends more time scrolling before bed than she thinks she ought to. She’ll pick up the phone to look at a couple of funny TikTok videos and whoosh, an hour’s gone by. She says she still gets enough sleep, so she’s not too worried about it, but she is alert to how absorbing the scrolling can be. (I’m just gonna read one more chapter, thinks ten year old me, one ear cocked to the sound of a parent’s footstep on the stairs).
“So you need to set limits,” she says. “So that your time spent scrolling doesn’t get in the way of the other things you have to do. Set a timer. Try cutting back by 10%. When you’re comfortable with that, maybe try a little more”. We fixate on the addictive quality of the algorithms, which is no doubt true. But is it a difference in degree or kind? I remember clicking through the tv channels late at night, unwilling to exert the bit of energy needed to turn the thing off and go to bed. Springsteen sang about “Fifty-seven channels and nothing on” back when 57 channels was an unimaginable explosion of content. Clearly the demon device in those days was that remote, which kept me from having to get up and break the spell of the diabolical machine. Now we blame it on the algorithms, rather than our own weak-kneed inertia.
Nearly Everything You See Online is Edited or Fake
In the days when we had three tv networks (plus tiny PBS) and one or two daily newspapers we knew that there were people who believed strange things. There were endless convoluted theories about the Kennedy assassination. Some people believed we’d never landed on the moon. Evolution was a hotspot for belief and disbelief. In the American South, a couple generations of revisionist history had many people believing the War Between the States had little to do with slavery. Scattered around the country in isolated areas were armed enclaves ready to do battle with the government. But beliefs like these were out of the mainstream and most people believed in the mainstream. We assumed that the newspapers and tv news shows were telling us the truth. They might make mistakes, but those were honest errors. Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America.5
The mainstream consensus started to crack under the weight of the deceits of the Vietnam War, but habits of belief are hard to break. We transferred our belief in veracity to the internet. Even now, in our world of fact-checkers and constant accusations of lies and misinformation, we can’t quite shake ourselves of the notion that there is an underlying stratum of truth and if only we can keep whacking away at the untruths, we (and our blinkered antagonists) will be able to see reality for what it really is. This is just as true for the followers of Q and the defenders of Donald Trump as it is for those who see themselves as firmly rooted in the rationality of the Enlightenment.
I turn to my n of 1. “One of the big concerns that people have with phones, and this is for girls particularly, is that you compare yourselves to what you see online and end up feeling terribly inadequate. Does that ever happen to you?”
“It did some when I was in middle school, but then I realized that everything you see is either edited or fake. So there’s no point in comparing yourself. So I don’t.”
“But if everything is fake, how do you figure out what’s true?”
“I ask my Mom. Or you guys.6 Like when I was worried about the demonstrations on campus, I called you to explain what was going on.”
This is a transition that’s been very hard for older people to make. We’re so focused on trying to identify and combat misinformation. Josie starts from the assumption that it’s all misinformation, so she’s relieved of that burden. When she needs to have something verified, she goes to the people that she knows and trusts. This seems terribly risky to me, but it makes sense. I grew up in the days when you relied on experts to analyze truth and falsity. But on the internet expertise has been replaced by persuasion. You need to recognize that you’re being manipulated at every turn. Then you’re better able to arm yourself against it. Sharp talking influencers are worth listening to, but you don’t trust them. Trust is precious. You don’t want to waste it.
Find A Community You Can Trust
Isn’t the question of trust the pre-eminent conundrum of the our age? How many kids have fallen into an online community that they trusted, even though it was full of conspiracy theorists and anti-government goons? Think of how many people trust Donald Trump!
Once again, I had it all wrong. Josie’s community, the people online in the snapchat groups that she is in almost constant contact with (as she picks up her phone 236 times a day) are nearly all people that she has developed trusted relationships with offline. People she became friends with in gymnastics from the time she was three, and then all through her school years. People they’ve introduced her to. (Her boyfriend is a friend of a friend who she met at a gathering of friends.) What the phone gives her is a way to keep these relationships vivid, even through all of the moves and life changes that she and her friends have gone through. My past is full of people that I was once extremely close to, but lost touch with as the barriers of distance became too much for occasional letters and phone calls to overcome.
This follows seamlessly from her distrust of everything she sees online. Of course she wouldn’t invest trust in someone she’d never actually met. How foolish is that, when no matter what somebody professes there’s always someone arguing against it. Better to say Build a community you can trust.
This resistance to the algorithms, this highly tuned skepticism, this rootedness in her offline relationships, were all unexpected. She is at ease with the online world, clear-eyed about its dangers, confident in her use of it all. She says it’s easier for her because she grew up with her phone. It was never a fancy new gadget shifting the ways she interacted with the world. She has antibodies that us older folks never had a chance to develop. We’re as vulnerable to the depredations of the internet as the Plains Indians were to smallpox. She’s made of tougher stuff.
(I’ll post Part Two tomorrow evening)
I explained to her that the convention when reporting the results of a survey (for example) is to refer to the n of x when indicating how many subjects answered a particular question. I was unaware at the time that there is a particular type of clinical trial called N of 1. This isn’t that.
167 volumes so far, going back to 1972 – there are many more to go.
It was 1999 when the CEO of Sun Microsystems said, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” We didn’t want to believe it then and we continue to battle, fruitlessly, against it even now.
Quoted in “Livelier Than the Living” by Catherine Nicholson, New York Review of Books, June 20, 2024.
I haven’t asked, but chances are good that Josie has never heard of Walter Cronkite. Neither, I suppose, have an increasing number of readers of these essays.
That would be Nonni and me. “Mommy, Josie, Nonni, Nonai”. The family refrain since she could talk. We were in a hotel in Maui, getting ready to go out. She was at the door, impatient as we gathered our things. “Go ahead,” I said. “We’ll meet you at the elevator.” “I can’t go out there without a parent,” she says, as if I’m being an idiot. “And who are your parents,” I ask, amused. She gives me the withering look only a four year old can train on adults, encompassing the three of us, “You guys.” Of course.