What am I looking for?
I scan the icons on the desktop. None are what I want. I look at the dashboard, scroll through the applications. I carefully consider each. I’m definitely looking for something. My mouse scrolls over Reminders, then Notes, then FaceTime.
I pause. FaceTime. Is that what I want?
I launch the application. The icon bounces on the dashboard. It seems like it might not start. I bring my mouse to the top left corner of the screen so I can quit the launch. I am impatient. If this isn’t what I’m looking for, something else is. I must find it.
Just before I scroll down to Quit FaceTime, the app opens. I almost quit anyway. But I don’t. The green light goes on above my camera. A black box appears on my screen. I expect to see myself.
But I don’t.
I see Maddy.
She is wearing a Penn track jacket. Her hair is pulled back. She is smiling and talking to someone, but I don’t have audio. Why am I getting her FaceTime feed? It is as if we are screen mirroring, or as if someone—Was it me? Did I do this?—hacked her computer, rerouted everything to mine.
I consider ending the call. But I do not. I am mesmerized. She is so bright and full of life. She is in a hotel room. She is sitting on the bed. The headboard is behind her, a piece of bad art above. I try turning up the volume, but it is already on max. Maddy is telling a story. She gestures a lot. Then she laughs. I know that it is a good sound even though I cannot hear it.
What magic has brought this to me? I don’t care. I don’t move. I don’t want a single molecule disturbed.
Maddy listens to whoever is on the other line. She speaks occasionally. She nods. After a minute, the conversation starts winding down. I can tell. And it makes me sad. Maddy is leaning forward. She smiles, waves.
Then she hits the end button.
I realize I have been bracing for her disappearance. But she doesn’t disappear. I don’t understand, but I know instantly that Maddy is unaware the camera is still on. She has ended the call. The camera should be off. But it is not.
I lean forward.
She inhales deeply. As she exhales, the brightness leaks from her face. Her elbow is on her knee. She raises her hand to her forehead. I can’t see her eyes. A minute later, her shoulders begin to shake. She wipes tears from her eyes. She is staring just off camera, at something much farther away than could be possible.
My heart begins thudding. I play with the settings. I turn on my microphone. I call her name. I touch the screen.
She still cannot hear me.
Tears keep falling from her eyes. So many that she stops trying to wipe them away. She seems to have forgotten she is crying. It’s like she’s not even there, not really.
I thought I was getting closer to her. I thought I was closer than I had ever been. I could finally see her. She was right there, right there on my screen. Wasn’t this intimacy?
But then it struck me as I quickly closed my computer:
She had never been farther away.
CHAPTER 9
The Picture
If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.
—Montesquieu
Lorraine Sullivan followed the social media feeds of her own kids as well as those of their friends. All the parents did. Free access, and thus free insight, into the thoughts and actions of the young people around them: what a gift and a reassurance, to be able to flip open her iPad or iPhone and know where the person she loved was, to know they were safe for at least another day.
The night of January 17, 2014, Emma Sullivan had just returned to Boston College for her second semester. Back in Allendale, Lorraine scrolled through feeds on her iPad and was stopped cold by the newest image posted by Maddy. She stared at the picture, absorbed it, allowed the energy of it to radiate through the screen. Exactly what was Maddy trying to say? A minute later, Lorraine returned to scrolling, but the aftertaste remained: That photo is eerie. The image made Maddy seem nostalgic for a time and place she had never seen. And if this was true, if she was, how would she ever stifle that longing?
This wasn’t the first time an outsider, a parent, had felt that way about Maddy’s social feed. Hers were more cryptic than the posts of other kids, more dependent on quotes, and views from high places; the images conveyed the feeling that Maddy was trying to say something, without knowing exactly how or what it was. What drifted from the screen was a kind of yearning, a wandering energy—something crucial had been lost, but not quite found.
A searching energy permeates almost every young person’s social media. After all, what is a social feed if not a journal, but in digital, visual form? Perhaps the most important distinguishing feature of a social account is its public nature, the understanding each user has, from the moment of launch, that everything is for public consumption. But perhaps we are overstating the effect of this distinction: If in private, most of us allow ourselves to say or write certain truths we otherwise wouldn’t, then perhaps the reverse holds true. Perhaps we share things in public that we couldn’t offer in private. If we’ve accepted that we are different in private, is this not also true for how we reveal ourselves in public? And which version of ourselves is more real?
As young people, we are trying to find our voice: trying out who we are, again and again, until something feels more accurate than the previous thing. Yet we rarely admit—or even recognize—that this is what we’re doing. On social media, few people confess that they’ve poured immense time and energy into what they post. We don’t confess this because we assume we’re the only ones who fret over such trivial things. Because nobody could possibly be as self-conscious as we are. We believe what we see. And we can’t be what we can’t see. We are so credulous when we assume that everyone else must be the version of themselves they portray in public, even if we are hardly the people we present ourselves as.
We put time into our social media because we believe that it affords us the unique opportunity to fashion our own identity. We care about the images we post and the lines we write underneath those images, because it’s all part of reflecting who we are and constructing who we want to become. Would you put more time, or less, into a post if you knew it was your last? Would you want the image and words to be perfect, an ideal lasting representation of you, or would you quickly recognize the futility of the pursuit, that the whole thing was a mirage merely reflecting distorted images of the real world? And would you instead spend your time absorbing the world itself?