People Talking Without Speaking, People Hearing without Listening

What does it mean that so many of our interactions are digital? In my experience, I’ve had several friendships that existed almost exclusively in cyberspace. People that I knew from school, but barely saw or spoke to, would tell me painful, intimate details of their lives over Instant Messenger that never would have been revealed if we were talking face-to-face. In fact, we almost never mentioned the private things we spoke about online when we spoke in person. It’s hard to be honest and candid when another person is looking right back at you. The strange pseudo-anonymity that the Internet offers makes people feel brave and safe.

I am a person who loves the AIM conversation. I’ve always been uncomfortable on the phone. I express myself better when I write, and an AIM conversation allows me to think and correct myself before I say something stupid. The same goes for e-mail. I would much rather e-mail my parents or friends because I feel a pressure to deliver on the phone. My education as a journalist has certainly helped me get over that hurtle, and I no longer cringe at the thought of calling strangers on the phone. But it’s with the people I love most, my friends and family, that I find phone communication hardest. Does that speak at all to the fact that traditional face-to-face or even voice-to-voice communication is no longer the norm? There is a level of intimacy there that many of us may no longer be comfortable with.

But what are we missing? There is something to be said for a connection between human voices on the telephone. Most inflections and emotions in the voice can’t be conveyed online. The more we rely on e-mail, text messages and AIM conversations for social satiety, the further we get from legitimate, human connection.

We watch strangers on YouTube. We create profiles on Facebook and MySpace, and leave them there for people we barely know to gawk at. With these sites, we are essentially providing a quick memo about our personalities on the Web, telling people to look at pictures of us, read our interests, and see messages from friends on our walls. From this, they can gather a sense of who we are, without ever having to bother with actually getting to know us.

It’s a new type of voyeurism. We stare at each other, on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and everywhere else, watching one another's public creation of life on the Internet, and in many ways, this is our new replacement for human interaction.

This digital personality is especially strange when it’s all that’s left behind. Today, when our friends die, there are Facebook groups to memorialize them. We write messages on their walls that they will never read because that's what we did when they were alive. The silly web page that we created will last longer than us, and our friends will use it to digitally reach out when they can’t do it in real life anymore. There is this new public performance of grief that never existed in previous generations. People used to write these thoughts in journals or letters, but now they publish them publicly behind the semi-anonymous shroud of the Internet.

But this excessive digital living has gotten to the point that we don’t even notice it. We get invited to parties online, submit assignments, set up job interviews. Relationships begin when people ask us out via text message, and we might hear about someone’s death, graduation, or their wedding engagement online.

There’s a new apartment complex in New York City that is designed to allow people to watch its residents. The building’s glass walls provide open viewing for passersby on the street to see inside, and for the people inside to see the passersby on the street. They can watch you; you can watch them. The interior is also equipped with an open floor plan that allows a great deal of “peekaboo” opportunities within the building. The bathroom is a glass cube, for example.

This particular brand of voyeuristic exhibitionism seems shocking at first. But isn’t it to be expected? Maybe it’s because we are too busy yapping into our cell phones to make eye contact with people. Maybe it’s because our lives are so busy now. Everyone works more, and when we’re not working, television and the Internet have replaced community and leisure activities. Maybe a lot of people stopped wanting to make new friends; we don’t need them because we live digital lives with our cell phones and computers.

So we have resorted to living in glass houses. Because if we can't live our lives in the company of other people, at least we can watch them.