On the night of January 17, Maddy took a series of photos of Rittenhouse Square, in downtown Philadelphia, on her iPhone. She was standing on the dead grass behind the main walkways in the park, behind the benches on which people lounge during spring and summer, and huddle during winter. Lights are dangling from the sparse trees, the beauty of the holiday season still radiating at dusk. The first photo Maddy took is cloudy in the lens, exuding dreariness. Her second photo showed nearly the exact same scene. In that image, an older couple is walking through the frame: the woman is wearing a red coat, the man a green coat and hat. The couple is in motion, a soft blur coming off each of them. In the final photo Maddy took, the couple is gone.
It is this last photo that Maddy began editing. She made the colors pop; the benches go from dull brown to a fiery red; the lights morph from small pops to glowing, gorgeous lanterns. And the night behind the foreground went from looking just like any other to appearing as something spectacular—a city park placed underwater, submerged, radiating.
This was not a picture of the real world, but a picture of what Maddy wished the real world looked like. “I tell my kids all the time: You have to decide how you’re going to filter the world,” Lorraine says. “You have to check yourself daily—what am I making of everything I’m seeing? Does everything they’re seeing have to be as good as everything we expect of them? I think we tell our kids they have to be really, really good at all these things. I think it’s rampant, especially in these affluent suburbs. This generation, everybody is supposed to be good at everything. But God forbid if you’re not. I tell my kids: I went to college. Nobody took us on college tours. They were just like, ‘You want to go to college?’ And they would drop you off and that was it. Nobody checked in on everybody, all day every day. The difference is astounding. Everybody is hovering over these kids. Are you winning at every game? Are exams going well? What are you doing with your free time? The pendulum has swung so far to the other side. I think it’s backfiring.”
Three versions of Rittenhouse Square, as shot and edited by Maddy on January 17; the final picture appeared on her Instagram account. (Madison Holleran)
On Wednesday night, January 15, Maddy went to a party with Ingrid. She was wearing black tights, a sweater, her black Nike running sneakers, and a black jacket. As the two friends were leaving the party in the small hours of Thursday morning, Ingrid took a photo of her friend. Madison is standing on the sidewalk, her right hand on her hip. Her mouth is smiling, but the photo isn’t clear, and it’s impossible to see if her eyes are, too.
While at the party, Maddy had taken a few photos, most with Ingrid. She picked her favorite, one of just the two of them, a young man grinning in the background. Maddy filtered the image, popping the colors, then texted it to her friend Justine.
Maddy: Do u like this enough to Insta?
Everything is filtered, either on the way in or on the way out, or in both directions. This includes practically everything Maddy did: the interaction when sitting in front of the therapist, or in Emma’s kitchen with her best friend. But at least in those, Maddy could not hide so easily behind a second digital filter. She could not hide behind the breezy lightness of an added emoji: a monkey covering its eyes, or an “lol” or “hahahaha,” which she casually added to almost all her texts.
Is there a human, in-person equivalent of a monkey covering its eyes? If someone says to you, in person, that they hate where they are, or what they’re doing, or what their life has become, could they make those words softer with any kind of specific facial expression? Would it even matter if they tried? You would still be in front of them, reading their energy and emotion, and the smile on their lips would be false, incapable of dispelling their desperate energy.
We have translated expressions and emotions into emojis, and simply using an emoji seems to tell the recipient that all is okay. The inclusion of even one of those animated faces signals ease and lightness, regardless of what emotion the emoji represents, even if it represents crying. The acronym LOL rarely means laughing out loud—not literally laughing out loud, anyway. Very little of what we say in text is a literal representation of how we feel, what we’re doing, how we’re behaving. It’s an animated, easy-to-digest version: an exaggeration or a simplification, but not a reflection. And that would be fine if it weren’t the main way we now communicate with one another. We believe we’re communicating with the humans we love and adore, and we are. But we aren’t absorbing their humanity.
Emoji is the world’s first digital universal language, and it’s frighteningly superficial. Ironically, emojis are devoid of real emotion. Maddy was in constant contact with dozens of friends and family, a skimming of the surface covering miles and miles of ground but very little depth. And through all those messages to all those people, thousands and thousands of communications, almost nobody noticed anything significantly amiss.
Before returning to Penn in January, Maddy asked her parents if she could take with her a picture of herself as a kid, holding a tennis racquet. She asked for duct tape, which went unused. And eventually, at some point before she left her dorm room on January 17, she opened her MacBook and wiped her Internet history. She was preparing for what had been simmering on the back burner; she was moving it to the front.
Anticipation