Using Phones as Phones in the Digital Age
I picked up Audrey, my 12-year-old daughter, from music camp last summer. Like every other kid in the known world, the first thing she did after saying “I missed you” was ask if I brought her phone. She’d had fun, but it had been a long two weeks. “It was a lot of music,” she said. “Like really a lot of music.” You can’t talk with a clarinet in your mouth.
I started driving. She often called friends; this time she called my brother. Called. Like this was 1985.
“I’m going to teach you to beatbox,” she said.
My brother said, “What?”
“I’m going to teach you to beatbox. Say ‘Patricia.’ ”
My brother said, “Patricia.”
“Say ‘Puh-tricia.’ ” Audrey really popped the p.
She strung that out for a few minutes—Patricia, Patricia, Patricia. “Now take away the ‘atricia,’ ” Audrey said.
That produced five more minutes of giggles. Then my brother hung up. Audrey called her father. “I’m going to teach you to beatbox! Say ‘Patricia.’ ”
“Hi, Audrey,” Dan, her father, said. “How was camp?”
After she gave a brief update, she returned to saying “Patricia.” Dan said, “I’ll see you when you get home!” Click.
I have a theory about technology: We’re all made for certain eras. Audrey should have been 12 in the ’80s. We all learned this shortly after her most recent birthday, for which she received a phone. She wrote some texts. She swapped some faces. Then she discovered that this wondrous device has a special feature that allows you to get a real, live human, almost anywhere in the world, to talk to you.
I, on the other hand, hate the phone. I was a teenager in the ’80s, and yes, we had Go-Go’s T-shirts and Lee jeans, but we also had phones ringing and ringing, loudly and forever, until you stopped doing whatever you were doing and allowed the caller, whomever that may be, to cannonball into the placid lake of your day.
In the ’90s I did have a brief patch of phone love, when I talked to boyfriends for hours at a stretch, precisely because it seemed romantic to monopolize their time. But that’s exactly the problem with the phone: It’s intimate, but it’s also a power move. If I call, you’ll drop whatever you were doing and talk to me, right?
At first I thought Audrey’s phone enthusiasm was not on trend. As everybody knows—and the Pew Research Center confirmed in its 2015 report Teens, Technology, and Friendships—kids like to text. And it’s hard to blame them. Texting is pretty great. You get to be social and antisocial at the same time. You’re connected but free.
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Those are not Audrey’s concerns. On a hypothetical Kinsey scale for introversion/extroversion, she’s on the extroversion extreme. And she’s in middle school. She’s studied how the earth rotates on its axis, but she doesn’t really yet know how little time is in an adult day. She calls her friends. She calls my friends. Plus, she likes the intimacy of actually talking (go figure). This, says Sherry Turkle, author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, is more common than one might think. Kids have texting fatigue. They’re tired of their parents’ endless texting too. The microcosms of conversation we get tapping out shorthand, emoji-filled messages to our friends are leaving us parched for real connection. Conversation, Turkle writes, “is the most human thing we do.”
Of course being human is still exhausting. The other day, when we were in the car, she called my cousin, who happens to have a new boyfriend.
She talked to my cousin for a while, and then she got him to put the new boyfriend on the phone to discuss RuPaul’s Drag Race in his charming British accent.
“That was so refreshing!” she said, after the boyfriend excused himself, saying he needed to eat his lunch. “Ten minutes and 26 seconds.”
Next she called her father.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Working,” he said.
“No, you’re not. You’re talking to me.”
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Elizabeth Weil (@lizweil) wrote about a cursed emerald in issue 25.03.
This article appears in the April issue. Subscribe now.
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