How The Internet is Killing Intimacy

George Strait sings a song called “Check Yes or No.” It is about passing notes in class, back in third grade. Part of the lyric goes like this:

"Do you love me? Do you want to be my friend? . . .

If you want to, I think this is how love goes,

Check yes or no.”

I remember my own embarrassment when my mother discovered my fifth-grade “list of the cutest girls in class.”  And then there was the summer when I made my normal visit to my Uncle Paul’s farm. This time I was tragically separated from my first “real girl friend.” I would scan the horizon looking for the dust cloud raised by the mail carrier’s truck. Upon spying it, I would leap upon my bike and pedal furiously down the seemingly endless lane to the mailbox. All the while humming the Marvelette’s refrain - “Please, please, Mr.Postman. Look and see. Is there a letter in your bag for me?”

That was the way love went back in those innocent days before the Internet. Words on paper. Words handwritten on paper. From hand to hand, from heart to heart. 

And not just for love-struck youngsters.  Who better than The Bard?

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? 

Thou art more lovely and more temperate."

Much of Shakespeare’s life remains unknown. Scholars debate for whom Sonnet 18 was written. Yet, they agree it was probably intended for a particular lady, or perhaps a young man. As I said they debate - endlessly. However, I’d be willing to bet the farm that he did not compose those lines with his thumbs.

In that seeming simple time of my high school years, love and intimacy were far more private concerns.  As close as we got to posting our "status" on social media was exchanging ID bracelets or carrying your girlfriend’s books to class. That was harder than it sounds. We didn’t have backpacks. Just humongous binders upon which you stacked a dozen textbooks - his and hers - and strolled off to class with what you hoped was nonchalance. It that wasn’t love, what was?

Then the Internet went public in 1994. Ten years later Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook” and intimacy has never been the same.  I don’t know who first said, “Privacy is so 20th century.”  Zuckerberg has been accused of being the source - but I can find no reliable data to convict him. So, unlike the renamed Facebook, I will refrain from simply laying that damning  accusation at his feet with no proof.  But his creation is the easiest target to snipe at when seeking to lay blame for the destruction of private intimacy.

When we consider privacy in their world, I ask my students “What do you do if you want to send a message to one other person, and be sure that the other person is the only person who will have access to that message?” The major social media platforms quickly fall by the wayside because those pages usually fail to employ even the existing security tools and hence are easy to hack. Furthermore, I learn from the class discussion, one contemporary version of the “exchanging ID bracelets” from the '60s has become sharing, with your significant other, the passwords to your social media accounts. No, really, I am serious. Next, the latest incarnations of "The Disappearing Message” applications like Snapchat get short shrift due to a campus-wide brouhaha last year that was fueled by the swift distribution of such “private" messages that were captured by screen shots. 

We eventually stumble our way to two options. The first is the most frightening, and the most common. They simply accept that "privacy is so 20th century,” and they try to game the system. I recently sat in on a colleague’s class and was introduced to what I have come to think of as “hiding intimacy in plain sight.” Her students knew it as “sub-tweeting.”  They thought of it as a passive-agressive form of messaging.  As I understand it, you post on Twitter or some similar site a message that does not refer to a specific "other person." However, the context allows a group of others - or a specific other - to understand that the message is directed at a particular person, perhaps themselves.

I was surprised that the students seemed to agree that this strategy was a variant of cyberbullying, a tool to attack.  It strikes me, old 20th-century romantic that I am, that sub-tweeting could just as easily be employed as a subtle form of flirting. A digital version of "Check yes or no" that carries the kind of deniability so important in the fragile early years of dating: “Huh? Me? Sub-text to whom? Are you nuts? Oh. You think she does? Really? Cool!”

So fun. Maybe. But still the "hide intimacy in plain sight" strategy is based on accepting the idea that privacy really is impossible on the Internet. You accept that there is no way on the Internet to send a love letter or a sonnet - or, for a more prosaic example, a private message exploring a possible new job at a different company. Every Internet message, it seems, runs the risk of becoming a public document that can be hacked and distributed to people who can then turn it to whatever intention may please them.   

The second - and to many of my students utterly alien - solution is to actually write a message on a piece of paper. Then you put the letter in an envelope, write the name and address of the person for whom the letter is intended on the envelope. Buy a stamp. Put the stamp on the envelope. And put the letter in a mailbox.  Actually finding a mailbox may be a bit of a challenge. If you have a physical mailbox where you get shopping flyers and political junk mail you can usually mail things from there as well. Put the letter in the mailbox and raise the little flag on the side.  That will tell the mail carrier that there is a letter there to be picked up. They will be surprised. If your mail comes to a bank of mailboxes - look for one that says “Outgoing Mail” or something like that. Put your letter in there.   

I know it sounds silly to provide those step-by-step instructions for mailing a letter, but a friend told me that he had posed a similar "how do you send a private message" question to his students. They had come to the same "snail mail" conclusion. After class a young woman came up to him and asked for more information because she had never actually mailed anything in her entire life.

Oh, and another thing to remember about this whole "put it in an envelope and mail it" thing - it all has to be done by hand.  Once you turn on your tablet, phone or computer and start typing you have created a digital version of your letter. It is harder to hack that kind of "on my own machine" message than it is to hack a post on social media, but it is far from impossible. Remember, the question was “What do you do if you want to send a message to one other person, and be sure that they are the only person who will have access to that message?” 

We find ourselves forced to the conclusion that attempting intimate communication in digital space is a risky proposition, no matter what your tech guru or personal teenage consultants tell you. To make a message digital is to make it public and hackable, as so many of our politicians and celebrities continue to discover. 

True love and deep friendship visit rarely. It seems quite sad to think that we live in a world where the "new normal" channels of expression for the sharing of those precious emotions are fragile and untrustworthy. That realization may, in itself, be sufficient to chill the urgings of a cautious heart. 

Yet there may be good news here, not to mention a dearly needed uptick in business for the US postal services. The purveyors of fine stationary, fountain pens, calligraphy teachers, and sealing wax manufacturers likewise may take heart. Remember the second option.  

You take a piece of paper. You pick up your pen .  .  .