This post is the third chapter of my book “HOMO CELLULARIS: TECHNOLOGICAL SCHIZOPHRENICS”. Click here to read the previous chapter.
Main Ideas: To dispel panic, let’s take a look at how technological schizophrenia actually effects different types of people in our society. We will look at a typical family representing different ages, genders, sexual orientations, professions. How does they use tech to better their lives? How does technological schizophrenia harm each one?
1. MULTIPLE DEVICES, MULTIPLE SELVES
One of the running storylines in the 2017 reboot of the hit series, Gilmore Girls, was the character Rory’s constant reliance on three separate phones: a personal phone, a business phone, and a third phone specifically for her hometown, the idyllic Stars Hollow, where cell reception is apparently quite unreliable.
As the show progresses, and we watch Rory again and again fumble through her bag looking for the right device, it becomes clear that this is more than just a visual gag. Rather, the multiple devices are a symbol of multiple selves.
Somewhere between adolescence and true adulthood, Rory is at the crossroads of her many selves. Her inability to assimilate the different roles demanded of her work life, relationship life, and family life, is mirrored in her attempt to manage her digital devices.
Like Rory, most of us will experience technological schizophrenia at some point. In the first chapter we discussed an extreme example, the fellow who is a farmer, a poet, and a BDSM enthusiast. The truth is that technological schizophrenia is far more prosaic than this. It is not only the intrusion of hidden online identities onto our public personas. It is also the difficulty average people experience simply being themselves on a daily basis.
The modern individual is burdened with the task of managing all kinds of simple everyday roles, and this multiplicity of roles is expected of nearly every member of our society.
To see this at work, I’d like you to meet the Watson family. They are both real and fictional – composite figures drawn from real family and friends of myself and my fellow authors, Tzachi, Udi, and Lior.
In this family there is a father, Daniel (57); a mother, Ellie (60); and three children, Wendy (35); Paul (27); and Robby (16).
They represent a span of ages, life stages, gender, sexual orientation, temperament, and career, and taken as a whole can show us how technological schizophrenia manifests itself in different lifestyles.
Let’s take a minute to meet each of them.
2. THE TEACHER: OVERWORKED & OVEREXPOSED
Daniel teaches at the local high school, which is the same school where his son, Robby, is a student. Working at his son’s high school means that for Daniel, maintaining a home/life divide and balance is critical. He doesn’t want his teaching career to interfere with his son’s high school experience, nor does he want his students thinking of him as their classmates’ dad instead of as their English teacher.
For this reason, his social media is kept under a tight wrap. He uses a pseudonym on Facebook and isn’t Facebook friends with his own son, for fear of crosspollination between the student body and his Facebook life. In addition to this, he completely eschews conducting any kind of parent communication on his phone.
“When I first started teaching,” he said, “I would give my students’ parents my phone number, asking them to schedule a call with me through email before calling or texting.”
This functioned well enough at the outset, but very quickly the system began to deteriorate.
Parents seemed to quickly forget about the “email first” policy, and would call or text Daniel day and night about issues concerning their kids’ grades or behaviour.
“I get it,” Daniel told me. “I’m a parent too. I understand that when you have a concern related to your kid at school, you want to get in touch with their teachers right away. After all, every parent only thinks about their own kid. They don’t think about the teacher who is dealing with a hundred students, each with parents who have their own concerns and who also want to call me when I’m trying to relax a bit at home!”
Further, the policy led to Daniel’s phone number falling into some students’ hands as well, which brought some obnoxious, late-night prank calls.
“Lesson learned,” Daniel said. “Now I only call them from the landline in the main office of the school. I have one day a week where I schedule time to stay late and make calls.”
This new system is a decent compromise. Daniel gets to draw a clear line between his personal tech and his work tech. But he acknowledges that in some ways its less convenient for the parents and for him as well. “I’d rather make those calls at home, or in the car, on my own time, but I just don’t want all these people having my number.”
3. THE ENTREPENEUR: THE DEADHEAD CEO
Next up is Ellie, the matriarch of the family.
Ellie is an entrepreneur. She runs two businesses, a large accounting firm and a boutique consulting company.
In the past she was an employee with IBM, and before that she was a professor at a business school.
She’s had a lot of careers, and has just as many sides to her personality.
She’s quick to announce that she’s a mother first. “My kids are the most important thing in the world to me,” she says. “That’s number one.” But she’s also a wife, an amateur violinist, a cinema enthusiast, and, surprisingly, a Deadhead.
When I asked her about technological schizophrenia, she at first said it wasn’t a problem for her.
“I am who I am,” she said. “And I don’t have anything to hide.” After a little probing, though, she brought up the struggle of keeping family time and work time separate.
“I have a lot of employees and a lot of clients,” she said. “It’s key to me to be available to them, to support them, to be there for them when they need guidance and to know that they feel comfortable turning to me for anything they might need. “At the same time, this is exactly how I feel about my kids. My kids know that if I’m on the phone with them and get a work call, I have to hang up. But my clients also know that if I’m on a call with them and get a call from my kids, I have to put them on hold. No matter who the incoming call is from, I feel like I’m obligated to take it. That can get a bit overwhelming.”
In addition to this, it can be difficult to play two different roles for her two different businesses.
“I see an incoming number that I don’t recognize and I get a bit panicked. Is it the police telling me they picked up my son from a party? Is it a new client at my consulting firm? Is it an employee of my accounting company? I have to make a decision on the fly about which me is needed for this particular call.”
4. THE EXECUTIVE: THE CARD-SHARP GO-GETTER
Now let’s meet John, the eldest child, an executive salesperson at a large tech company based in New York.
John, like Daniel and Ellie, wears many hats.
At work he’s the button-down professional, a true grown-up. But he has another side to his personality.
“I’m not proud of it, but yeah, I like to play a little online poker now and again. Just last week I won 2,000 bucks!”
John discovered a natural ability for cards when he was in college, and while he knows that online gambling has a stigma, it’s his one vice and he says he knows when to fold. In other words, while he feels no inherent inner struggle about this habit, he wouldn’t feel comfortable shouting it out to the world.
“If my family found out, they wouldn’t approve. I make a good living, and they would wonder why I’d gamble my money away just for a thrill. They’d think it’s stupid.”
But the truth is, the thrill is exactly what John is looking for.
“I’m a good guy. I play by the rules. I show up to my job every day and give it my best. I like poker because I might lose. The stakes are high. It gives me a bit of a rush and shakes things up for me. Also, sometimes I win big. I paid for my last vacation with poker winnings.”
More than his family, though, he would be concerned about people at work finding out.
“I don’t have a gambling problem, but if people at work discover you play online it’s like they found a flask in your desk. It doesn’t send the right message.”
And while John has no issue transitioning from the savvy poker player he is at home to the good-natured and professional salesperson he is at the office, his phone is less discreet than he is.
For one thing, notifications from poker apps distract him during work hours.
He wants to focus on work when he’s at work, but his phone is constantly presenting him with alternative versions of himself, many of them quite tempting.
“I get distracted by a Facebook notification and then end up logging in and chatting for fifteen or twenty minutes.” Multiply those twenty minutes by five when you add his Instagram, his games, and his Tinder account.”
“Yeah, that can be a problem,” John said. “Facebook is definitely the biggest time-waster, but poker and Tinder are more embarrassing. I’ve had notifications for both pop up during meetings with new clients and then suddenly it’s like one of those dreams where you show up to class and you’re in your underwear.”
For a salesman, efficiency and focus are key. So is presenting a certain persona.
But having exported so much of himself into his device, John finds both of these things hard to manage.
5. THE FREELANCER: THE BARTENDING PROFESSIONAL
Next up is Paul.
Paul lives in Los Angeles, where he works as a freelance writer and graphic designer.
Twenty-seven years old, he’s at the start of his career and works a couple nights at a bar to supplement his income.
Like his brother, he’s single and has a range of dating apps on his smartphone.
His writing and design clients don’t know about his night gig as a bartender. “It would make me seem like less of a professional,” he said. “But when you’re a freelancer, even if you have ten clients, they each think they have twenty-four/seven access to you. Sometimes I’m tending bar and get a call from a client. They don’t like it when I don’t respond, but I don’t want them to know about my other gig.”
Keeping a separation between his bar job and his writing job is one thing, but keeping a separation between his general professional life and his personal life is nearly impossible.
“A freelancer is someone who works seventy hours a week so that he doesn’t have to work forty,” quips Paul. “I don’t want a nine-to-five job, but I recognize that I end up working a lot more hours as a freelancer than I would if I just went to an office. Sometimes I get a ton of assignments all at once. Each client thinks that they’re number one. I try to carve out a little personal time for myself but then a work call comes in and I’m back at my computer.”
Keeping his personal life in order is also a struggle. “These phones are little windows that anything can come through at any time. Sometimes good things come in and sometimes bad things come in. With my last boyfriend, we were out getting coffee when he saw that I had a Tinder notification. He blew up at me, accusing me of cheating on him, and never really stopped being suspicious after that. The truth is that I just hadn’t ever gotten around to deleting the app. We had only been going out a month, but that Tinder thing kind of tanked us.”
6. THE STUDENT: DAZED, CONFUSED, & EXPOSED
Finally, let’s meet Robby.
“I have no privacy!” This is Robby’s number one concern.
He still lives at home with his parents, and after getting caught drinking beers at a party they now randomly ask him to fork over his phone.
“They would admit that it’s unfair to put a microphone on me and listen to everything I say, but for some reason they think it’s ok to look at who I’m talking to and what I’m saying if it’s on my phone. It’s so messed up!”
Robby is a good kid, even with the occasional beer party taken into consideration.
He works hard at school and dreams of getting into a good college to study biology.
Most of all, he dreams of getting out of his parents’ house.
“They think it’s their right to check in on my phone. But my phone is how I talk to my friends, and that’s not something I want them to see. I curse. I make weird jokes. I’m more loose with my friends, you know? I think that’s ok. But then they see something, even if it’s totally innocent, and they act like they don’t even know who I am anymore. Even Obama smoked pot when he was younger! Come on!”
7. THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE
As our society has moved from one of rigid social restrictions to one of greater freedom, people desire to be many things at different moments. We want to open as many tabs within our souls as possible, becoming prisms through which the light of life experience can pass in many different directions.
We call this “having it all.”
We desire freedom. We want deep spiritual lives at the same time that we are killing it in the business world. We want holistic family lives while still getting our freak on at the club. We want to be young and old, wild and tame, devout and depraved.
This is a relatively new phenomena in society.
In Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the character Vronsky notes the transformative feeling of arriving from Moscow to St. Petersburg on the train.
The railroad was a symbol in nineteenth century literature of the disruption of the holistic community and the holistic man. Able to travel, a man may now be one thing in St. Petersburg and another in Moscow.
He may also travel places where he is anonymous.
In this sense, it’s not a stretch to say that the railroad was the beginning of IT. It was, after all, the railroad companies that first spearheaded the laying down of phone lines.
The highway system had a similar effect in 20th century America. Lives were disrupted. People were freed from their native patches of soil.
This freedom gave Jack Kerouac the ability to be Jack Kerouac, setting himself free from society as he zigzagged back and forth across America on the open road.
Today, however, we live on a digital interstate. We may be as many people as we like and inhabit countless spaces. But because they are non-physical, we are always both there and always not there.
The tipping point of this new reality was when the word "offline" become irrelevant – when the internet became as accessible and taken for granted as electricity.
With our current technology, we are always in Moscow and St. Petersburg at the same time. And in many other places as well. But unlike Vronsky and Kerouac, we don’t feel either refreshed or free. Yes, we can be anywhere and anyone we want. But at the same time, we can never shake off where we came from or who we were.
Digital technology ensures that every version of ourselves will be present in every new context we enter into.
For example, Tinder is a sort of digital single's bar. In the physical world, you would never invite your grandmother to the single’s bar. But in the digital world, she’s always invited. She can send you a text right when you’re stumbling, arm and arm, out of the bar with a new friend; or you can get a message from someone on Tinder just as you sit down to tea with grandma.
If you have a group chat with friends on the popular messaging app, Whatsapp, you can text without having to censor a thing you say. It’s as if you’re safe and sound in the confines of your apartment, goofing off with your friends. But in the digital world, there is no such safety. A sudden NSFW (“not safe for work”) message from a friend during a meeting is the equivalent of the boardroom door flying open to the sudden presence of your old frat buddies.
Humans may be good at having multiple faces, but we’re not good at managing these faces at the same time. More importantly, we don’t want to.
Much of this technological schizophrenia leaves us feeling like Fred Flintstone running back and forth between his Water Buffalo Lodge meeting and Pebbles' birthday, eventually getting busted when he forgets to remove the Lodge hat.
8. THE THREE POWERS
The interviews I conducted that make up the stories of Watson family revealed a few things to me.
The first of these is that all members of the modern family rely on technology to manage both their personal lives and their professional lives. It doesn’t matter if we’re dealing with service providers like a teacher or a freelancer, or with entrepreneurs, executives, and high school students.
The second is that their technology is not managing their multiple roles and identities adeptly, which is to say that it’s not allowing them allowing them to be free of St. Petersburg in Moscow, and free of Moscow in St. Petersburg.
The Watson family interviews also showed me just what we’re using this tech for. The three main powers which our technologies help us to expand are those of communication, information storage & exchange, and presence. But for each power expanded, we lose control over an equally important aspect of our lives. And so, the same technology that empowers us will also hinder our ability to communicate effectively, secure privacy, and maintain focus.
In our next three chapters, we will take a close look at each one of these expanded powers. They are the central arenas which our digital technology attempts to improve us as humans, but also the areas in which we have most dramatically lost a sense of control.
“I’ve noticed that nothing I’ve never said has ever done me any harm.” - Calvin Coolidge
This post is the third chapter of my book “HOMO CELLULARIS: TECHNOLOGICAL SCHIZOPHRENICS”. Click here to read the following chapter.
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