Connecting

In high school, my best friend moved to Las Vegas. We kept in touch for the rest of our high school years primarily through writing letters. Long letters where we played with type faces and colors and reveled in the glories of late 90's word processors. Who knows what I wrote about, probably just what I was up to those days, what I had read, who I had hung out with, what movies I had seen, and the like. It didn't matter, we were just keeping in touch.

I think we both had email accounts, though I don't clearly remember when I took that step, nor what my first email address actually was (my oldest email account now only dates back as far as 2004, when I returned from two years' missionary service in Italy). If I could somehow recover that high school email inbox, I would find the skeletons of those impossibly long forwarded email surveys, jokes still in circulation on new platforms, and other indications that my friends and I were riding the wave of this exciting channel of communication in the typical fashion for people in our generation.

I further connected with my friends via ICQ, with its colorful flowers and status indicators, all while playing freecell and listening to stolen MP3's on winamp. The freecell and the music were really just to keep my hands busy and to shut out other distractions while sending and receiving chats from my friends. I even vaguely remember having my own domain on angelfire, though the content and time frame of that site are even more lost to me than the origins of my email. After all, this was my internet infancy.

I graduated high school and went to college 10 hours away in eastern Idaho. Email became not just a secondary source of contact with my friends who stayed in Washington, but my primary one. To send and receive email, I would walk across the small courtyard of my apartment complex to the computer room, which boasted 4 internet-connected dinosaurs. My brother and I had brought my family's outdated HP with us for word processing (and freecell of course), but I don't believe there was a single internet connection in our apartment. This would have been the fall of 2000.

I also remember banking by phone during this time in my life, checking my balance via an 800 number I dialed on the corded phone in our apartment kitchen, while my easy mac cooked in the microwave.

At the end of 2001 I left the country, and for two years I emailed my family and a few friends, wrote a few snail mail letters, and called home about 3 times. I also used a film camera--not because digital cameras were not around, but because they were so expensive that it would have been difficult to replace one in case of loss. In retrospect, I'm glad I have the film negatives of my time in Italy as the miniscule digital images that I would have brought home with me would hardly have translated into quality prints.

When I got home in 2003, I got a laptop for Christmas, a now clunky Dell Inspiron 1500, which probably weighed at least 20 pounds. It had a 30 GB hard drive, which sounded impressively expansive, considering during my high school years, my Dad had allotted each of us kids with a 100 MB ZIP disk  for storing our personal files. I went back to school and could now email from my apartment, or even from the wireless network available on campus.

Email and Windows Instant Messenger were my main modes of online communication. I still have the chat archives in which the blossoming friendship with my future wife has been preserved. My children may eventually cherish those archives the way many regard bundles of dusty love letters written by their grandparents. We married in 2005 and continued emailing our families and friends updates about our married lives.

In April of 2007, we had our first son. I emailed a couple of pictures of him to my closest friends and old roommates.

Five months later, we "joined the bandwagon" and started our own family blog. It made sense: why send emails to everyone when you could create one update and invite everyone to catch up that way? Notice the shift from what were primarily personal modes of communication to a more public, one-size-fits-all-audiences genre. Traci did most of the posting in the early days, but I contributed, and I directed my friends there to "keep in touch," or at least, to keep tabs.

Maybe the problem with blogging was (is) that it was (is) so one way. You put a post up there and your audience engages with it very passively. There is the option to comment, but what a hassle, especially when you have to prove you are not a robot. You really have to want to leave a comment, and there is next to no obligation to do so. Eventually, instead of sending a targeted email to a friend, you are posting a story and pictures on a wall that you don't know if anyone is even looking at anymore.

I caved to the mounting pressure in early 2009 and felt like something of a latecomer to Facebook. Traci joined before me. Our second child had just been born. The joy of reconnecting! Finding old friends from multiple eras of my life--high school, mission, college--whose email addresses had been lost to me, or which I had never bothered to collect. Where blogging felt like a painted wall facing a void, this felt more like a room with a circle of chairs.

One key lesson I learned about using facebook: you have to interact with people to have people interact with you. The temptation to just be a fly on the wall, endlessly scrolling, never clicking or commenting, results in an empty notifications bar. So you have to like things, you have to leave comments, and you have to add your own updates.

Three years later, as Facebook's algorithms determine more and more of what and who I connect with, as advertisements continue to creep in, it all gets to feeling so hollow. It love to see pictures, to read status updates, to follow life events, to know what friends are thinking and doing, to read and share interesting articles, but it still feels empty.

It starts feeling like we are talking to the empty air, casting a status update or a picture out into the middle of the room and waiting for someone to grab onto it. You've got to have good enough bait to get a bite in their news feed, that endless list of hooks and lures. I start to discover that having someone on your friends list is not the same as having a real friend. Genuine human connection comes from one-on-one contact, which most modern social platforms discourage because they are too archaic, too reminiscent of the email or letter-writing days.

Maybe, no matter the medium, we've only been talking about ourselves the whole time, but something changes when you have an audience of just one person.

Blogs are fading out, but I keep posting there. Facebook growing obnoxious, and I am reluctant to try newer forms, which experience leads me to expect to be less and less authentic. I'm getting to feel like writing letters again, but how many relationships do I even have that could bear such a burden?