Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I'll Never Do (12 page)

The dreaded PING was originally created by BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) as a means of getting the attention of a phone’s owner, perhaps in an emergency. Many, like me, leave our phones on silent to prevent unnecessary distractions. As long as the phone has service, though, the PING function will override the user’s current setting and make the BlackBerry vibrate, flash, and beep,
regardless of where you are or what you are doing. In an emergency, I would imagine this to be useful. In a relationship (or a business meeting), it is not. That night I began to realize that each time I failed to answer a BBM within four or five minutes—even if we were having a mundane conversation about nothing at all—Brenda would PING me, demanding my attention and response. It was annoying and aggressive. And I totally admit that I did the same thing to her many, many nights.

The only thing in the PING! family that is even more aggressive and annoying is the more and more frequent abuse of the Find My iPhone application. One of the great things about having an iPhone is that if you lose it, you can sign in to iCloud or an application called Find My iPhone and locate your iPhone. The application also has a great feature for those of us who generally lose their phone while walking around their own apartment. It’s on the shelf! On the terrace! In the refrigerator (yep, I’ve done that)! If you click “Play Sound,” your iPhone will make a shrill pinging noise until you find it and click a button. Whether your phone is set to silent, vibrate, or loud, this same vibrate-and-ping noise will occur. Now, if I were to guess, I’d say most people in serious relationships know each other’s Apple ID (which is all you need to sign in to Find My iPhone). We are always on each other’s phones, downloading music, playing Candy Crush, ordering SeamlessWeb. If my wife’s phone is dead and she wants to do any of the aforementioned, she just uses mine. It’s normal. But what’s
not
normal is something
that happened to my friend Kelly. She was out to dinner with four of her friends and happened to be in a fight with her boyfriend at the time. She was annoyed and placed her phone facedown on the table (note that it was still
on
the table) and put it on silent. She had to at least enjoy one course with us without maniacally texting. About nine minutes later, a shrill noise came from her side of the table. We all knew the noise. But why was Kelly trying to locate her phone when she and we all knew it was right in front of her? And then we realized it. It could only be one thing: Kelly’s boyfriend had become frustrated with Kelly’s lack of response and had subsequently signed on to Kelly’s Find My iPhone or iCloud application and clicked “Play Sound.” Outrageous and inappropriate as it was, it got Kelly’s attention. She picked up her phone, embarrassed, and went outside to call her boyfriend. She never came back in. (That sounded really ominous. She’s still alive, she just left dinner. But anyway, enough about her, back to the story about me . . .)

So around midnight, Brenda sent me a note that said she was going home to sleep. We BBMed “good night” and I went back to the conversation with my friends. Shortly thereafter, we left our table and went to dance in the back room, where there was barely any service. I put my phone in my pocket in case anyone (Brenda) needed to reach me. Around two
A.M
., my friends and I decided to go home, and we walked upstairs to street level. As my BlackBerry regained consciousness, my pocket was attacked by buzzing. Clicking to my BBM, I found four messages from Brenda:

“How’s your night?”

“Wow. You’re so shady.”

[PING!]

[PING!]

[PING!]

[PING!]

“Cool. I get it.”

I couldn’t tell what time each of these messages had come in (they had come in pairs as my service was spotty), but I could only imagine where Brenda’s mind had traveled over the previous two hours. I knew where she was coming from; I wanted replies from her as much as she wanted them from me, and I hate waiting for people to text me back.

Despite the hour, I called to check in, but she screened. I could tell she was doing this because I heard two and a half rings before her voice mail picked up. That was one good thing about being addicted to my phone: I knew ring patterns by heart. Zero or one and a quarter rings means the phone is off or out of service (in New York, this usually means someone is on the subway—or in an underground bar); four or five and a half rings before voice mail means the person missed your call (or was “missing” it on purpose); and anything in between, like the almost-three rings I got that night, means a screen—the person you’re trying to reach doesn’t want to deal with you at that particular moment (or they do, and they’re making you work for it) and has pressed ignore your call. I hung up, confused and bothered. I thought Brenda wanted to talk to me—why else would she send me those BBMs? I left a message, pleading
with her to talk to me. Then, like clockwork, a BBM came through: “I don’t want to talk to you. Leave me alone.” Now, anyone who has dated me knows that this kind of statement will lead to one thing and one thing only: another phone call. I called Brenda again. Once again, two and a half rings. Then came two BBMs:

“So as soon as I go to sleep, you turn off your phone so that you don’t have to be reachable? Why would you not want to be reachable? I’m assuming she was very pretty.”

And:

“Hope it was worth it.”

• • •

In a way, Brenda and I were playing a new digital version of hard to get, and it was all about control. If I took three minutes to respond, she would take almost four. If I took twenty-five seconds to write back, she would take twenty-six. It was a game, and Brenda played it well. Exhilarating and exhausting, it went on for our entire yearlong off-and-on relationship.

I considered each of her zings (and nonresponses) to be electronic daggers and imagine that if we had spoken on the phone or if we were in person, Brenda would
not
have said the things she wrote. But that’s the clever (and enraging) thing about texting and social media: one can be as nasty or passive-aggressive as humanly possible without having to endure (or even fully imagine) the reaction of the person on the other end of the exchange. In the digital realm, people can write things that they would normally be too
embarrassed, afraid, or self-respecting to say. The ability to text, e-mail, or instant-message from behind a screen allows people to get their point across without having to listen to the other person’s side of the story. The writer never has to accept the other person’s point of view, and the unfairness or cruelty of the comment is never reflected back in their face. Plus, we can always just choose to turn off our phones when we’ve had enough (or if we actually start to feel something).

I have found that it’s so much easier to write quick, mean notes over text or e-mail if I am frustrated, angry, or upset. Dr. Aboujaoude cites Dr. Jeanne B. Funk, a psychologist at the University of Toledo, who is concerned that we’re becoming less moral and more cruel, because the
“desensitization makes us bypass the moral centers of the brain and robs us of our ability to empathize.” Dr. Wicker notes that it is certainly easier to be aggressive through electronic communication, as
“we escape the consequences of our aggression when we do not have to endure the empathic pain that face-to-face communication would likely bring.” I have had brutal fights over text but as soon as I am in the same room as the person, the fight seems to die down and things are okay again. How could I tell them such mean things in person? It just seems cruel. Over text, it’s a game and anything goes. Simply put, we are more capable of feeling empathy when we are looking at someone’s face, at their eyes, seeing and receiving their feelings.

According to Gary Small, MD, and Gigi Vorgan, the authors of
iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the
Modern Mind
, the
“empathy deficit may not be limited to just young adult and teenage brains. Empathy is learned, but it can be un-learned as well.” They found that teenagers “were much slower to recognize” a happy facial expression after playing a violent video game. They also found that the neural circuits of both “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” were affected after only
one week
of Internet activity. Technology can impact brains of any age. None of us is immune.

Dr. Aboujaoude argues that through the Internet, we turn into different people. He writes,
“Gentleness, common courtesy, and the little niceties that announce us as well mannered, civilized and sociable members of the species are quickly stripped away to reveal a completely naked, often unpleasant human being.” We just type out responses without filtering them properly. Because we are behind our little screens, it’s a lot easier to insult each other, to type some horrible statement or write something rude or out of line. After all, we’re not saying it to your face. We can’t see your reaction. It does not register in our mind that what we write may hurt you. We have, in a way, forgotten that you have feelings.

Cyberbullying isn’t just some middle school phenomenon—it’s what we’re dishing out on an increasingly regular basis. Living behind our screens enables us to be crueler than we may intend, inhabiting avatars that are more reckless, selfish, dangerous, and lacking in compassion, even toward the people we love. We rely on our screens to give us the confidence to express our feelings—however passive—or
overtly aggressive. As Dr. Aboujaoude explains,
“our online self is also dangerous and irresponsible, running roughshod over our caution and self-control. It can encourage us to pursue unrealistic or unhealthy goals . . . it can encourage us to behave more selfishly and recklessly.” I recently gave a speech in Houston to an all-girls school on social media, sexting, and cyberbullying. I spent the morning and part of the afternoon with the student body, about nine hundred high school girls, and heard their stories and the ways that social media was affecting their lives. Like any other high school kids today, they had horror stories relating to sexting and cyberbullying, and of course thousands of anecdotes of feeling left out, lonely, or ganged up on by social media. I’d heard most of it before. But then they mentioned something called “sub-tweeting” or “subliminal tweeting.” I consider myself pretty well connected but this was the first I’d heard of this new activity on Twitter. Sub-tweeting is when someone tweets a statement about another person but does not mention them by name. For instance, if Kelly, Dylan, and I are having lunch and Valerie sits down (and Kelly clearly does not want to sit with Valerie because she despises her), Kelly might tweet, “Guess someone didn’t get the memo that we didn’t want to sit with her.” Kelly has sub-tweeted. Dylan, Valerie, and I all follow Kelly, so we will see the tweet and all secretly know that she is talking about Valerie. This anonymous tweeting gives us a false sense of freedom to say anything we want because we don’t feel like we are truly addressing the person, nor do we feel responsibility for their feelings due to the technical anonymity of our sub-tweet. It’s
the newest kind of cyberbullying, and it’s spreading every day because it’s so easy. As we all know, it’s addictive to be in on a secret, and to be in on a sub-tweet is exactly that.

For her thirtieth birthday, my then-girlfriend Gina wanted to throw a small cocktail party for her closest friends. Of course, we knew there would be people we had to leave off the guest list—once you invite any peripheral friends, the floodgates open and there are fifty more you’re obligated to invite, and you might as well post the event on all of your social media for the entire public to see. After mulling over the endless lists of best friends, mutual friends, and obligatory invitees, we arrived at a sane number of guests. We knew that there would probably be four or five people who would be insulted to have not received an invite and would probably be disappointed when hundreds of Facebook photos were splattered across their feed, but we were happy with the list, and we went with it. The party was a huge success, and as we expected, our guests posted photos onto Facebook. As Gina and I went through the album, we noticed that one name reappeared in the comments section of several photos.

“Wow! What a great party, wish I had been there!”

“Everyone looks so beautiful. So sad that I missed it.”

“Whoa. Looks like this night was a blast . . . Almost as much fun as we had in Cabo . . .” (Ellipses are always a sure sign of intense feelings, insecurity, or contemplation, and this comment had two sets of ellipses, so I am pretty sure this person was feeling terribly left out.)

The comments were made by Camille, one of Gina’s high
school friends, who had narrowly missed the cut. She was one of the few we felt bad about (but not bad enough to invite her). Her comments on Facebook, however, reminded us why we kept her off the list: the truth is that she and Gina had been friends in high school, but this was fifteen years later and they simply weren’t that close. If she felt close enough to the birthday girl to be invited to her thirtieth birthday and was hurt when she wasn’t, perhaps she might have felt close enough to talk to Gina in person about it. Instead, Camille opted to make her point in front of the thousands of people (friends of friends) who could see the album.

Facebook and other social media provide a venue for people to express feelings without the consequence of an awkward in-person or on-phone response. It is easy to get in that first or last jab without having to feel embarrassed or defensive or to fear any repercussions. Like the boss who uses a human resources team to fire his right-hand man, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites have become mediums for the meek and cowardly.

Every impulsive statement and every irrational reaction seem to make their way onto the screen. Passive-aggressive tendencies and cruelty are magnified as impulse overrides our ability to contemplate what we really want to say and how it may impact the person we’re “talking” to.

If we get into an argument, our typed responses overflow onto the screen, interrupting each other as we try to get our point across without reading the other person’s messages back. We’re not even thinking through what we are
typing. In these heated, filterless moments, we are capable of easy, thoughtless cruelty. On the other side, the person we’re fighting with may not even be reading our responses because they are clicking their own keys just as furiously. Often a fight that did not even have to happen—and would most likely not have happened in person—escalates into something much more damaging. As William Safire wrote in his former “On Language” column in the
New York Times Magazine
, “The pregnant pause has been digitally aborted.”