A few weeks ago, I was texting with Spike, one of my eleven-year-old son's friends.
There's a sentence worth dwelling on for a moment.
Exchanging text messages with a prepubescent child was a novel experience in and of itself, but I realized I was in new and disquieting territory about half a second after I pressed "send" on a message suggesting that he lie about his age so that he could finish setting up his new Discord account. Discord wants you to be at least 13, but I really wanted Spike to have a Discord account despite being only eleven years old. We'd lied about Axl's and Belle's age while setting up their Discord accounts, so why shouldn't Spike do the same?
Discord, if you didn't know, is a communication platform that originated among gamers who wanted to be able to communicate with each other while enjoying online multiplayer video games together. If you've seen pop culture images of kids—or perhaps actually seen your own kid(s)—chattering on headsets with friends to coordinate battle plans in an online video game, there's a good chance that Discord was carrying the conversation.
I'll let you research Discord yourself if you are curious about more of its particulars, but for our purposes think of it as "a way for Otto's kids to chat with friends while playing Roblox in different locations together without either monopolizing a parent's iPhone or having to ask a parent to set up a Zoom meeting."
This is one of the two main ways people use Discord—that is, for direct communication among a group of friends, known to each other in real life (IRL) and gathered into what Discord calls a private "server," which no one can join unless invited. Used this way, Discord is, again, just a place for friends to talk, a glorified conference call or video conference like so many of us have gotten accustomed to using for both work and play during this plague year.
There is, however, a "dark side" of Discord, as the moral-panic-style headline of a 2019 Wall Street Journal article put it. The WSJ's concern was directed at the landscape of thousands of Discord servers organized around specific games or other topics that anyone from anywhere in the world may join, and which—being crowded, anonymous places on the internet—are naturally fertile grounds for "racist memes, vulgar talk, and bullying."
As soon as I pressed "send" on that message to Spike, I had a vision of his father—who by the way is a very wide and tall, badge-and-gun-carrying state probation officer—coming across the new app on his son's phone and/or this very text-message exchange, recalling a fleeting memory of some similarly scaremongering report about this mysterious thing called "Discord," and wanting to know just what gateway to hell I'd been encouraging his son to step through and why.
My intentions were pure, I swear! My goal was only to give Axl and Spike a simple way to meet up online that would be less parentally mediated—more self-service—than parentally arranged Zoom meetings or borrowed phones. Back in the summer, I'd made a halfhearted attempt to move the children's friends' parents in this direction, but the response was lukewarm, with only one or two households installing the app, and I didn't push it.
Then one night, upon receiving my phone back from Axl after he and Spike had been FaceTiming and texting each other while playing Among Us [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Among_Us], my eye fell upon a chat history full of silly and/or gross GIFs. As usual, I was depressed by the lazy banality endemic in the corners of the internet my children are for some reason drawn to, but, you know, whatever. The real problem that struck me was not that Axl and Spike had been exchanging this stuff but that, because Spike already has his own phone but Axl had been using mine, the chat history made it look as though I had been the one sending this stuff to Spike.
I was already weary of having my workday interrupted by regular texts addressed to Axl from Spike, who—during one of the periodic hiccups in school scheduling/opening created by a massive local infection spike—was apparently being left at home alone all day with nothing to do but play on this phone of his. The text message exchange I was scrolling through was the last straw. Not only did I not want anyone to think I might be the one chortling with Spike over, well, the kinds of things that American boys on the cusp of middle school chortle over, I was repelled to even have this stuff on my phone. It was like the mental or rather digital equivalent of finding greasy little-kid fingerprints on my computer screen.
I immediately reminded Spike's parents that Discord was free and easy to install, and I even typed out a brief bullet list of the steps they would need to follow, but there was no response. A few evenings later, I was at the bottom of a couple of glasses of wine when Spike again texted me to see if Axl were available. Before I had quite thought things over, I had sent him the App Store link for downloading Discord and was importuning him to misrepresent himself to a tech company. This is something, like jaywalking and drinking whiskey, that all children must one day learn to do but which most parents would probably prefer to be the ones providing instruction, but what else could I do?
To paraphrase Tolstoy (whose novels would have been a lot shorter if his characters had only had the ability to text one another, come to think of it), families that are happy with their children's screen/device usage are all alike, but each family that is unhappy on this point probably has all sorts of highly specific and particular reasons why. I'll spare you the details of the Oakes household's steps and missteps in shepherding and/or submitting to the inevitable passage of its children along the path to full digital citizenship and instead point out something that was already bothering me even before the pandemic but which has now been cast into even sharper relief.
To wit, among the many other reasons why the 21st century is an awful time to be a child, kids today have no easy way to get in touch with each other.
Sure, if they live in the same neighborhood, they can walk over to a friend's house and just knock on the door, but then that's never not been so. For a brief window in time—from, say, the mid-twentieth century until about ten or fifteen years ago—they could also make independent use of a simple remote communication tool if, say, they didn't feel like walking over or, perhaps, they were being asked to shelter in their homes while a deadly pandemic ran its course. I speak, of course, of the landline telephone.
That window is now closed or at least almost closed. The age of the landline phone is, to most intents and purposes, over. Yes, I know landline phones technically still exist, but fewer and fewer households have them anymore. We do, but the only reason is to give the children an easy way to call 911 if Daddy falls down the stairs and can't move or Mommy "won't wake up." Like most households with landlines, we are forced to leave the ringer turned off so as to avoid the constant barrage of calls from scammers, robots, pollsters, and the other untermenschen who are the 21st century's landline dead-enders.
As a result, one can't just ring up another house's landline and reliably expect an answer anymore. This is all well and good for the adults, who have their own mobile phones and can effortlessly reach each other this way, but what is a child to do? Long before the pandemic started, I was already frustrated by Axl or Belle asking me to text the parent of one of their friends to ask the parent to ask the friend if the friend wanted to come over or something like that. This was annoying not only because of the time and attention it sucked away from my own narcissistic solipsism but also because of how obviously infantilizing it must be for all of these children to have all of their parents involved in every little communication of theirs.
All of us who believe children should be forced to wait until at least, say, 14 before being issued their own phones loathe and despise those parents who crack earlier, but when it comes right down to it this is the only obvious solution to the question of how to enable one's children to communicate independently and autonomously with their friends. The problem is everything else that comes with a smartphone and the many downsides they introduce, with the biggest one being the increased likelihood that they will reach chronological adulthood with no experience at or comfort with being bored and/or alone with their thoughts. Another way of phrasing this problem is that, essentially, they will never actually grow up.
In the popular conception of how technological "advances" unfold, there is a narrative arc in which the "shortcomings" of something people use today are recognized by some inventor or company and then addressed in a new product offering, which in turn will only sell if consumers—who many economists still laughably insist usually act in their own rational self-interest—see it as responding to their needs. It is possible to list all sorts of "downsides" to landline phones that first cell phones and then smart phones "addressed," but increasingly I see many of these not as downsides but benefits, at least when compared to the state of things today.
Yes, it is easier to reach someone directly today, using a smart phone, than it was in the 1980s, when the choices were limited to phone calls and maybe faxes. On the other hand, was it such a bad thing when kids trying to call each other might end up speaking, however briefly, to their friends' parents, who might be the ones to answer the call? You can learn a lot simply from how a teenager asks to speak to another teenager in your household, I would imagine, not to mention the opportunities such serendipitous contacts pose for actually getting to know your children's friends, one small nibble at a time.
Yes, it is more "convenient" (although this should be a definite reach-for-one's-revolver word, at least when heard from marketers) when all the members of a household have their own phones, but on the other hand a single landline line at least limited overuse. I remember a point in high school when I was having girlfriend trouble and my father, who worked at home and needed access to our phone as well, finally had enough of my hours-long telephonic colloquies on this subject and put his foot down. And so, yes, I did end up going to a payphone down the street from our house more than once as a result, but I would say this was a better option than being able to sit in my room and just endlessly text about things throughout the night. At least I had the chance, in between walks down to the payphone, to think about what I wanted to say, at least my quarter didn't last forever, and at least talking in semi-public forced me to think a little about how I wanted to present myself.
Speaking of infantilization and what seems the growing unlikelihood that the United States will ever again produce a generation of adults, let's not overlook how, as children grow into teenagers and—one prays— eventually leave for college or otherwise move out, modern digital tools encourage way too much communication between them and their parents. It is hard to imagine any parents of college students in the 1980s or 1990s thinking that, having finally gotten their houses back, what they really wanted to do was not start having sex on the kitchen table again but rather exchange little messages with their supposedly almost grown children throughout the day.
In retrospect, one of the most "educational" aspects of my first college stint, which took the classic form of residential student-hood on a campus a day's drive from home, was that—down to both inconvenience and cost—I hardly ever spoke to my parents or anyone else who wasn't actually on that campus with me. It's not that I never turned to my parents for help or advice, but I was perforce selective about when I chose to do so. Sometimes I even did it not with a phone call but a letter, which gave me time to better reflect not only on what I was asking but—while waiting for a reply—sometimes gave me time to devise my own solutions.
I realize all of this sounds like nothing more than a totally boring middle-ager's standard-issue complaints that things were better when I was a kid, and I realize that what follows is not original to me and might even be old news to many of you, but it bears repeating that just because 2021 comes after 1985 in the calendar doesn't mean everything now is better than it was then and that we are all the beneficiaries of some nebulous thing called "progress" that automatically unfolds as time goes by.
It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that humanity's march is ever onward and upward, but there is actually no such thing as "humanity" and just because new gadgets and apps are being invented all the time doesn't mean we really need or ever even wanted any of them.
For an example, consider Amazon, which likes to boast that it is "laser focused on its customers' needs." This isn't a lie, but "customer needs" is a term of business art in this context and doesn't carry the meaning that the dictionary definition of "need" would lead one to expect. When companies like Amazon talk about responding to customer needs, they aren't referring to conscious, explicitly expressed desires on the part of their customers. If they were, it would be a lot easier to understand Amazon charges on one's credit card statements. "Customer needs," in this context, are better understood as opportunities, increasingly discovered through the use of massively powerful artificial intelligence tools operating on huge amounts of customer data, to sell us more than we would otherwise consciously decide to buy. As the old joke goes, if a customer leaves your shoe store carrying only the laces he came in planning to buy, you haven't sold him a goddamn thing, and no one realized they smelled bad without deodorant until they were informed of this fact by the inventor of deodorant.
Way back in the 1980s, how many mentally healthy parents of college students found themselves longing to be able to continue communicating with and micromanaging them throughout the livelong day? What child, cracking wise and giddy with a friend on the upstairs hall phone—its cord stretched to its limit to reach under her closed bedroom door—found herself thinking that her "user experience" would be improved if only she could see her friend and apply image-warping "filters" and silly stickers to their video images? Can we really say we "needed" any of this?
In the way of such things, we did not realize how wonderfully simple and essentially unimprovable landline phones were until they were gone. It never occurred to us to worry that they might go away—that an age might come when we would have actual dozens of other options for communicating but would do everything we could to avoid simply talking. How can it be that, with so many tools for connecting, so many of us feel so alone?
