A couple weeks ago, being a dutiful member of the online generation, I signed up for turntable.fm. The site allows folks to join a room and listen to music played by “DJs” who are really just other users. Each room has a “stage” where five of the DJs, represented by little cartoonish avatars, play music for the rest of the folks there. If you’re listening, you have the chance to say a song is good or bad—too many bad votes for one song means it gets skipped. Also, if one of the DJ slots on the stage opens up, anyone else in the room can jump up and start playing his or her own songs.
On my first visit, a couple weeks ago[1], I spent a few minutes figuring out what was going on. I’ve already called myself a member of the online generation, but what I meant to say was that I’m a member of the “most adaptable” generation[2], which is the title I think should apply to people my age. This is mostly because we’ve had almost every imaginable technological advance thrown at us over our quarter century here, and we’ve adapted to every one of them. (We’ve had to, though, so I’m not sure we really deserve much credit.)
Anyway, since I am, indeed, part of the adaptable generation, I managed to get up to speed with turntable.fm in decent time. I should clarify. I managed to understand what was happening on the website, I did not, however, understand what it would mean to take part as a DJ. But that had nothing to do with the technology. It had to do with me, and it’s what I’d like to explain now.
I—or, my avatar—was sitting in the room, half paying attention to the songs playing, when one of the DJ slots opened up. I had set up my queue of songs, and I was all set to click on the little yellow bubble that said, “Play Music” and would have taken my avatar up to the DJ stage. But as I went to move my mouse, I froze and I was brought back to a different time, a time when turntable.fm didn’t exist. A time, too, when my social life was of utmost importance. The time I’m talking about is middle school.
What about this online DJ party website, exactly, would make me feel even one ounce of what I felt like back then? It’s a good question, one that I doubt most people using turntable.fm would ever have to ask themselves. But for me, it was a question all-too-present. When that little yellow bubble popped up, any of the self-confidence I’ve gained in the past ten years[3] slipped away. I was no longer over six feet tall and slender; I was shorter and chubbier with wider gaps in my teeth and a bowl haircut. And I was at the worst place in the world for a chubby kid with no self-esteem: a middle school dance.
The parallels aren’t perfect, but bear with me. When I was given the chance to play my own music, a torrent of questions ran through my head, though all had the same basic premise: “What if they don’t like me?” This is probably the same reason I never asked anyone out in middle school. I knew I wasn’t secure enough in my own body to have the kind of swagger needed to pull off a move like that. The fear of embarrassment was always greater than the reward that might have come had I taken a risk.
And, apparently, it still is. Although now that I think about it, could the stakes in either situation have been any lower? Honestly, how much of a blow is it, really, if some 17-year-old girl on the internet labels your favorite song, “Lame?” And, in a related question, how awful would it have been if some tween girl turned me down when I asked her to dance ten years ago?[4] In fact, in the long run, I would have been much better off asking several tween girls to dance, having them all turn me down, and still going back for more. It would have given me wonderful personality attributes: persistence and the sort of confidence that comes when you no longer fear rejection. But I didn’t do that then, and I didn’t jump up on the DJ stage a couple weeks ago.
Around the same time I signed up for turntable.fm, Google’s social networking site Google+ came out. Being adaptable and all, I signed up for that as well. And, like Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr before it, I’ll learn how to use Google+, because, as I said before, we need to adapt to these things when they come. If we don’t, the tweeting world will go by without us. The arguments for adapting have been made well and often, and always boil down to the fact that the change becomes such a necessity that it’s not worth resisting all that much. You might as well get on board.
This isn’t to say that no one has ever questioned all these changes. In Bowling Alone[5], Robert Putnam laments the loss of civic engagement, pointing out that people spend more time in their own homes or in their inner friend and family circles, instead of bowling leagues and the Elks club. Earlier this year, Malcolm Gladwell made a case that the person-to-person connections necessary to pull off something like the sit-ins in the 1960s south were so strong that they could never be replicated in the Twitterverse. (The title of his essay was something like, “Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” which pretty much sums up his point.) In a subtle way, this Toyota Venza commercial makes the same case. If you don’t care to watch the ad, it depicts a set of parents who, according to their teenage daughter, are not being social enough because they only have a handful of Facebook friends. (She has 600 something[6].) Meanwhile, the parents are out mountain biking with their real-life friends and the daughter is in her room, alone, looking at pictures and saying, “That is not a real puppy, that’s way too small to be a real puppy.”
Personally, I don’t know what to make of those arguments, that the ties formed by social networking sites are not really ties at all. Some days I’m on board with them. When Google+ came out, for instance, I’d be lying if I said that this thought never crossed my mind: “Oh, great, another way to be lonely.[7]” But then I started using it, and had a video chat with four of my best friends, all of whom are scattered in different cities along the east coast. Google+ let me see and speak to people I almost never have the chance to. It’s hard to complain about technology when it lets you do something that remarkable.
But whatever is the “right” side of that debate, there’s another issue it completely ignores, which brings me back to the middle school flashbacks brought on by turntable.fm. I may not be more alone because of the internet. I also may not be less alone. But I am less confident because of it, and that’s because the internet has found a way to shine a light on my diffidence.
For people who crave constant approval (a different brand of low self-esteem from my own), the internet, a place like Facebook for example, provides an outlet. They can post inane status updates and count the number of “likes” they get. Or they can do something like the guy in a story a friend once told me. This guy sat in a college class and spent the entire 50 minutes refreshing his browser to see if someone new had posted a birthday message to his wall. Then, there’s me, and I imagine there might be others like me, who don’t crave approval, but still live in utter fear of rejection[8]. The thing is, I don’t really care, in a direct sense, if someone doesn’t like me[9]. But, I did care at some point when I was younger. And I cared a lot—definitely too much. So I care now about this sort of thing indirectly, not because I want to like me now, but there was once chubby kid at a middle school dance, totally unsure of himself, who really did want people to like him. And since that chubby kid grew up to be me, I’d hate to see him face the rejection he so fears. I know that kind of rejection will make yet another dent in his already flimsy self-confidence, and that he’ll be stuck with that dent more than a decade later.
If someone were to say that a song I chose was “Lame,” nothing in my present life would change, but the foundation on which it’s built would start to shake a little. And given that the foundation isn’t all that sturdy to begin with, I figured it was probably safer to remain in the crowd, leave the DJ table for someone else. For me, hiding has always been much easier than seeking.
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Keep your head down, strive for balance, and walk, with one foot in front of the other.
[1] I’ve been back another time since the first, and what follows doesn’t accurately represent that return trip. I was hardly as worried, which may have been a result of alcohol consumption, or the fact that the other “DJs” that second time were all people I knew in real life.
[2] Maybe I should come up with something catchier and write a book about it—it’ll be my response to Tom Brokaw’s, “The Greatest Generation.” We twenty-somethings will become “The Adaptablest Generation.” Or “The Chameleon Generation” (but not the “Karma, Karma, Karma Chameleon Generation”).
[3] Please don’t laugh too hard at the idea that I have gained self-confidence. I admit it was a low starting point, and the gains have been marginal, but resist the urge to be cruel here. It’s not cool to laugh at people with low self-esteem.
[4] If I asked a tween girl to dance now, and she turned me down, then the answer to this question would be much different. For many, many, many reasons, that scenario would be very, very bad. Not so much because she turned me down, but because I was, for some reason, asking.
[5] This, I think, predates this social media stuff, but I think he’d still say civic engagement isn’t what it used to be, and that social media isn’t helping, although I could be wrong, since I haven’t looked.
[6] I wonder what she’d think of my 217 after seven years of being on Facebook.
[7] I hope when you read this, you imagined Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh saying it, because that’s exactly what I sound like when I think things like this. (Also, thanks for noticing me.)
[8] It’s sad to admit this, because I’m 25 and should be past this by now.
[9] Chances are I probably dislike them a lot more than they dislike me.
Balancing on Painted Curbstones 