an auto-ethnographic memoir of the ways social media has changed (almost) absolutely nothing

In 2003, I graduated from college and moved to New York. Well, Jersey City, New Jersey to be exact. But I worked in Chelsea. For this small town girl, it was the illusion of “living the dream,” but I was too poor and too depressed that my top-10 University degree was not helping me do anything worthwhile with my life.

Yes, 2003, as you will recall, was pre-Facebook. When I moved from the Midwest to the East Coast that October, I had already begun to migrate away from Friendster and towards Myspace. It would not be until late 2005 when I would, under pressure from co-workers, open a Facebook account.

In 2003, I was employed as a librarian at a boutique architecture firm on 22^nd Street, right around the corner from a Barnes and Noble where people like Betty White and David Sedaris regularly did public readings. The only thing I liked about my job was that it sounded fancy and I once ran into Austin Scarlet (from Project Runway season 1) in the building’s elevator. But really being the “librarian” meant that I opened mail, filed catalogues, and eventually learned to master the art of using Excel as a payroll system. The “boutique” firm did not usually design cool restaurants or private homes. Most of our business came from the hospital sector.

I quickly found that the actual amount of work I needed to do in an eight hour day probably amounted to about 90 minutes. But I had the internet. I read the New York Times website cover to cover (or whatever the appropriate term would be), back in the days when there was no pay structure. I wrote on the billboard site for all of the Discovery Channel shows I watched with my roommate at night. I wrote emails back and forth to said roommate who worked downtown for a large credit card company. We usually averaged about 70 emails a day. Then we started using gchat instead and we lost count. I was obsessed with this website called Flavor Pill which essentially posted free and low-cost arts related events around the city. Every week they had a short 200 word essay contest to win tickets to some sort of film premiere or art opening. I won about every other month, which is a testament to the time I spent crafting these essays, rather than any innate writing talent. And by 3:00 when it seemed I had exhausted all other alternatives, I resigned myself to Myspace. I searched for new music there. I commented on friend’s latest picture uploads. Of course back in those days, people uploaded pictures at the tune of 5 a month. I even met new people. I don’t remember how exactly. Probably through groups one could join. I met a professor of anthropology from Florida who ended up guiding me through the graduate school admissions process a few years later. I also remember essentially planning a lunch date with a woman who worked a few blocks away, but I canceled at the last minute and just went to the Whole Foods salad bar 3 blocks away. I even started this here blog while working there.

Today, I read an NPR article that reminded me of those days. The days when my nokia phone worked just fine. When the internet was a waste of time, but I needed a way to waste time. When I lived a twelve hour car trip from my family and my best friend had just taken off to backpack in Australia for a year. I had no land line, so I called my mother using my cell phone, usually on Sunday afternoons. My roommate and I had internet at home, with Ethernet cables running between our bedrooms (Who needed wifi? Who needed internet in the living room or kitchen? I had my fill of internet at work). My boyfriend did not have internet at home, but he did have a giant television with 200 channels. The article laments, like so many, that “We Are Just Not HereAnymore.”

I offer my story here as an example of what the article gets wrong. In 2003, I spent at least 6½ hours of my eight hour work day, mentally not there. And social networking at it’s early stage was my last resort for ways to waste time at work. I’d then ride the train home, listening to my new mp3 player, reading a book, and barely making eye contact with anyone. Once home I would make dinner and watch tv with my roommate. We were physically in the same room, but our interaction was minimal. We found it so funny that this was our usual mode of existence that we hung a painting of us sitting on the futon staring at the TV (pictured above). On nights that I spent with my then boyfriend, I was often driven crazy by his obsession with television. He often spoke exclusively in quotes from whatever Bravo TV show was hip at the moment. In the morning, if we took the train to work together I was often deeply offended because rather than talk to me while we rode, he preferred to wear his headphones and listen to the news on his pocket radio (maybe I should have known it wouldn’t last). In those days, I paid rent on an apartment in Jersey City, and received paychecks from an architecture firm in Manhattan, but I didn’t live there. I lived through the phone calls to my mom and sister. I lived through the monthly emails sent by my best friend in Australia. And occasionally, when we’d all get together for a backyard barbeque, Sparks, and a rousing game of paper telephone, I lived with my friends. But we did not have rousing, meaningful conversation. We’d watch tv and comment, and generally drunkenly make fun of each other. The adventures would end up retold in my roommate’s livejournal. Photos would be shared via Photobucket or Snapfish. The stories might end up condensed into inside jokes about a hairy rock in the bathtub or what happens after bazooka, but they were not worthy of literary inscription.

The point is, maybe we’re not “here.” But if we are not now, we never were. People have been interacting with people in other places since the beginnings of modern humans’ existence. They have been preoccupied with what’s going on “over there” with “those people” for 200,000 years.  To think that new forms of technology are creating supposes there is some prior, “more authentic” form of communication we’ve left behind. But that simply did not exist. We are still human. We still communicate with other humans in the mode of our time…from cave painting to Snapchat, these modes help us share information with people close and far, for now or later. So let’s stop lamenting the social ills that everyone seems to want to find to be emerging from social media and get on with the usual business of being social with those in our immediate vicinity and those far outside of it.