The best part of life is often the way we anticipate what is to come. For a trip, for the weekend, for a party, for so many moments that are happening after and apart from the ones we are currently living. Sometimes we also believe that another place will change us, or at least how we feel, and that it will be a change for the better. And even if we recognize, when we get to this time or place, that it has not changed us, that we are still just ourselves, we cannot help but fall for this trick the next time, and again and again afterward. We fall for it because it soothes us during all the moments we aren’t doing exactly the thing we wish we could be doing, and because it allows us the transcendent emotion of anticipation. Anticipation allows us to be in two different moments at once. But it is often a zero-sum game: we steal from one to fuel the other.
In the poem “Questions of Travel” by Elizabeth Bishop, she writes the following: “Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres? What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around?” Anticipation fuels optimism, at least temporarily. We tell ourselves that the current moment will not last forever, that the next moment will deliver us somewhere better. Of course, if that promise is repeatedly broken, if those next moments are never better, a kind of melancholy can set in: both our present and future seem tarnished.
Isn’t social media fueled by anticipation? A world exists in our phone, which we can retreat to—an escape that might offer us something more pleasant, or at least a distraction from our momentary boredom at being a human who is alive in the world, and therefore dealing with all the things that come with that. Social media reflects our actual existence, but feels freer: not mired in tangible weight and sweat and fear and sadness. Social media is a picture of the Colosseum in glorious lighting, with an upbeat hashtag; it’s not the friend standing in front of you, dismayed at her inexplicable disappointment.
In the fall of 2015, I guest-taught a freshman class at Columbia University. Approximately twenty-five students had read “Split Image” as well as a collection of essays by Susan Sontag, On Photography. The idea was to introduce to the students the concept that photographs, though seemingly unbiased, are often manipulated as much as, if not more than, words. Sontag writes:
Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lane) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film—the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.
One key word exists in the above Sontag quote: conscience. During our conversation at Columbia, the students mined how they felt about social media, and they kept striking on a similar concept: obligation. So many of these college freshmen felt a moral obligation to project a certain kind of happiness. They could not, as one student put it, “in good conscience” disseminate sadness and unhappiness into the world. Because they chose to remain conscious, they participated in a performance meant to make the collective comfortable, but which came at personal cost—a cost often small, but occasionally great. The layers of ethical issues are numerous. Some of us could be sharing “just to do it,” but the fact of our sharing will evoke in others feelings and ideas about the way the world works. Our posts are part of an ecosystem: we are all engaged in creating a story that reacts to the stories around us. Then if you dig one layer deeper, we are dealing with another variable. Before we share, we engage in a conversation with ourselves about what kind of image of ourselves we are placing in the world and what the image must mean to us as it relates to the world. Social media is a form of offense and defense: we consume, we absorb, and we decide what to consume and absorb based on what we’ve consumed and absorbed.
Inside that small Columbia classroom, we started discussing this cycle at a granular level. We experience a moment emotionally. And during many such moments, we often consciously capture an image, the content of which is often the most appealing interpretation of the moment. Then we make an intellectual choice about if, and how, to share that image, a decision often but not always influenced by the moral obligation we feel to contribute positively to society. After we share the image, we monitor the feedback on the post, which will influence our understanding of what does and doesn’t resonate, and what we might share next time. Then the cycle starts again. We start viewing our world through the lens of what shares well—a hybrid reality in which people and locations and pops of color exist both in our tangible world and also as backgrounds for images that will share well. In other words, when you walk through Central Park, you are partially absorbing the sights and sounds of being alive, and you are also pasting items, in your mind’s eye, into a potential social post. Perhaps we are now all like walking versions of those collages we used to make—the ones that incorporated real photographs as well as idealized magazine cutouts and headlines.
The question bouncing around the minds of these students was more about effect than about process: Were they emotionally experiencing life differently because of this cycle? Was it eroding the quality of their experiences? When you are not concerned with sharing every moment with hundreds (or thousands, or millions) of others, does the moment belong to you in a more profound way? Sometimes when we talk of Hollywood stars, we hypothesize that all of the pictures they’ve had taken of themselves, those posed for and those stolen, have somehow zapped them of an unquantifiable essence, like a distant cousin of what happens to the photographs themselves, which fade over time. If you share a picture of yourself eating pie, instead of simply enjoying the pie in real time, is your absorption of the sensation diluted?
A few hours after the class at Columbia, I was walking along the Gowanus Canal, in Brooklyn, talking to my dad. The sun was bright in the sky, and I remember looking at the light reflecting off the usually dense, murky canal water, and I remember considering for the first time that this dingy body of water was actually appealing in its own, flawed way. (Ever since that day, I’ve looked at the Gowanus differently—seen it as a kind of artwork, a literal absorption of the city it runs through.)
As I was watching light bounce off the canal, I was telling my dad about the class, and about Maddy and what she must have been feeling and thinking. He had listened to me on this topic many times over the months, but on this day, after I stopped talking, he didn’t reply. I waited for one beat, then another. I flexed my foot on the bottom rung of the railing that kept me from tumbling into the water.
“You there?” I finally asked.
“Yeah, I’m here,” he said, then paused again. “Just do me a favor, okay? Take care of yourself. Promise me that if you start feeling down, you’ll tell me.”