Lit Up Page 7

  When the group sessions were over, Nino led off by observing that “Huxley makes Bernard out of his image of how he himself would fit into the Brave New World,” which was probably true. Latisha said, “If he had a mother, he would feel secure,” which may also have been true, but no one in the World State has a mother. At one point, Bernard, who is infuriated by Lenina’s vapid ways, suggests that she have a child—something forbidden in the World State, where women wear Malthusian Belts, which prevent conception. In Mr. Leon’s class, the girls seized on Bernard’s overbearing remark. The plangent Vanessa said indignantly, “It’s not his business to tell her she should be a mother,” and Maud joined her, saying, “He talks as if he were above her,” which, as it happens, is literally true—Lenina is a Beta Plus, Bernard an Alpha Plus.

  Would the students get Brave New World? Did they understand that the World State was a tyranny ruled by biological caste and by pleasure? They weren’t reading the book; they were reading themselves in the twenty-first century—Bernard was a sexist. Marina, who had been so impressive in the past, said, “I find him unpleasant, and if I were living there I would slap him. He constantly makes fun of the teaching. He’s trying to be unorthodox, to rebel against what others say.” The trouble, alas, is that the highly conscious and critical Bernard lacks the courage to rebel against “the teaching,” an ideology that controls virtually everyone so thoroughly that almost no one can imagine any alternatives to it. The students were right about Bernard, who was a worm, but no, they weren’t getting the book, and it occurred to me that Mr. Leon’s fifteen-year-olds, born after the totalitarian era in Germany and the Soviet Union, might not know that such a thing as complete control had ever existed. In Huxley’s itchy dystopia the atmosphere is openly erotic, happiness is mandatory, suffering forbidden, but even in satiric form, his tyranny is just as powerfully coercive as that of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

  I thought Mr. Leon was going to straighten them out about history, but that wasn’t his way. He asked the students to read up on totalitarianism on the Web, just as he had asked them to read up on puritanism earlier, but he had something more pressing on his mind than history. Brave New World was a book for now.

  “How many hours a week do you spend using electronic media?” he demanded in class. He turned and made a list on the board: television, computer, cell phone, radio, iPod or iPod equivalent, video games. Then he totaled up his own consumption. Television: one to four hours. Computer: fifteen to eighteen hours. Cell phone: three hours. Radio: zero. iPod: seven hours. Video games: zero. The total: twenty-six to thirty-three hours a week.

  “Huxley’s primary fear,” he said, “was that technological advancement endangered the individual. Okay, if you go down this list, how much time on average per week do you spend doing each of these things?” At last, his odd question about the students having dinner with their parents made sense. Nods, smiles: they understood the implicit charge. They were addicted to electronic media; they didn’t sit down to family dinners because games mattered more than chicken, texting more than family conversation. They were amused, but they didn’t think the charge was important. Their time spent texting and the rest was central to their lives.

  At Mr. Leon’s request, they wrote down their own totals. Some watched TV three hours, some twenty-one. Justin haughtily said that he didn’t watch at all. An angry kid, Justin, less accommodated to his life than the others, and someone to watch—everything he said was interesting or strange (“My grandmother has ten dogs. Two of them bit me,” he noted one day). In the entire class, the highest total was forty-two hours a week, which produced a derisive round of applause. The boy who watched that much TV was Hasan Azim, a heavyset, extremely amiable fellow who was born in Bangladesh but raised here. His father, a chef, had died in 2001, his mother had never remarried, and he took his responsibilities as the male in the household seriously. The family, including Hasan’s two sisters, was Muslim, and Hasan practiced his religion faithfully, praying every day; he intended to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Yet he was an Americanized Muslim, a New Yorker, and a ravenous media consumer.

  Mr. Leon turned next to social media—to Facebook, the self-publicizing diary of the age. Four of five said they weren’t members, but then Mr. Leon began asking them to state both their Facebook time and their total media time. Nino said zero for Facebook, but his total media time was a staggering 174 hours a week—he listened to music constantly. John Gruen’s total was forty-two hours on Facebook, his total media time 135 hours a week; Latisha’s grand total was ninety-seven, Vanessa’s fifty-four, Hasan’s an unimaginable 238 hours a week, Marco’s two hundred. He said it with a grin.

  How was this possible? Two hundred hours? Two hundred thirty-eight hours? Hasan was a busy guy, looking after his family, but he somehow had time to experience over two hundred hours of media a week. I stared at them all in disbelief. The entire week was only 168 hours long. Mr. Leon was baffled, too, but they laughed. “Overlapping! Multitasking!” they shouted. They were merry. Didn’t he get it? They did their homework with music or TV on, or with Facebook nestled on one side of the computer screen. Those who truly loved Facebook had it on from the time they got home in late afternoon until they went to bed hours later. Or they texted all day and into the evening. (This was just before Instagram became popular and well before Snapchat caught on.) For those who were hooked, social media coexisted with time itself: Facebook and texting were the mediums within which life took place. The students lived on Facebook and on smartphones as earlier kids lived with their friends in the streets, in backyards, in parks and playgrounds, in suburban game rooms. Some of them said they didn’t love Facebook. It was mean, it was intrusive, kids acted out on it, someone was always making use of the information you put on it. Still, except for the few who scorned it altogether, they didn’t turn away.

  “If you’re doing media one hundred hours a week, how do you have time to talk to your friends?” Mr. Leon asked. Well, they listened to music and watched television with friends. They were socializing as they watched. But as they said such things, they were on the defensive, and several bridled at Mr. Leon’s aggressive questions. “We need it to live,” said Susanna, a dancer with golden hair and a big smile. Jose, one of the quiet and somber Latino boys, said, “It’s your own choice.” They may have been rueful about the time spent, but they were not about to be shamed out of it. They chose it.

  Mr. Leon persisted. “What if I say we’re just wasting time? Our self-worth and self-esteem is connected to how many notifications on Facebook we have. If someone comments on your photo and says you look handsome, you feel good. When we’re on the cell phone all the time, we no longer look at people the same way. We no longer have compassion for other people, we’re spiritually adrift. We become concerned with this.” He held up a phone. “My mom and her friends in Louisiana spend a lot of time with each other talking. They just talk. But texting gives us a lot of time to filter our thoughts.”

  He stood still—he was almost immobile. The thin beard and slightly pointed chin and receding hairline; the taut, precise, angled, and wired body; the eyes darting around the room; the penetrating voice that seemed to find students wherever they sat—he reminded me of someone physically, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. At the moment, he was passionate—as angry as a biblical prophet in his scorn for straying tribes.

  “I asked my seniors what their media totals were.” He looked down at a sheet of paper in his hand. “The average is seventy hours a week. That’s 3,640 hours a year. Over a period of seventy years, that’s 254,800 hours or 10,616 days.” More silence in the room. Was he serious? Yes, he was. He was assuming, I could see, that his seniors would live until they were eighty. Their media habits, in this calculation (and I checked his numbers later), took hold by the time they were ten. Then they would live with the same habits for the next seven decades. But could this be true? Lives vary, habits wear out, interests and needs shift. People become obsessed with new things, o
r withdraw into themselves. Still, Mr. Leon’s numbers had their shock value. “We spend twenty years of that seventy years sleeping,” he said, “and you’re telling me you’re going to spend another twenty years on this stuff. In the thirty years left over, will you ever wish you were somewhere else? How much time do you spend drunk or high? How much time do you spend living? It’s a truism that it’s not until we’re near death that we begin wondering how we have spent our lives.”

  An extremely quiet room. I could hear my own breathing. He wanted to jolt the students out of easy acceptance of media habits that had become so much a part of life that most of them couldn’t see they were eating life. Never mind the prophets. He was more severe than Hawthorne’s veiled minister confronting his congregation. They had sinned against themselves. Facebook and texting were their way of wearing a veil. They substituted narcissism and a meaningless public persona for self-knowledge.

  And now we heard it. “Starting at five today, I’m going to ask you to step away from all this for two days. No grades; we’re going by the honor code. From five tonight until the end of school Thursday [this was said on Tuesday]. You really have to give it a shot. A digital fast—no cell phones, no TV, no iPod. If you need the computer for homework, okay, do homework but nothing else. Some students, when I’ve done this in the past, do nothing with the time. Try to do something.”

  * * *

  They all went cold turkey. And the first day, a few did “something”—they sat down and did their homework right away. Then the troubles began.

  Annabelle, talkative, with curly hair: “I had nothing to do, and I was really bored.”

  Jared Bennett, a darkly handsome boy who didn’t speak much: “I was so restless I had to do push-ups and running in place.”

  “Good,” said Mr. Leon. “You’ll be in shape.”

  Maud: “I made my mother put on music. I couldn’t do my homework without it.”

  Vanessa, who was often close to tears: “My TV is gone, so I had to read a book.”

  Jordan of the strong shoulders: “How can I make plans without cell phones?”

  Fourteen students claimed that they had made it through the two days without giving in, fourteen out of thirty-two students, and Mr. Leon told me that two or three were probably fibbing. Only three of the holdouts—Vanessa, Jordan, and Hasan—filled the time by reading a book, and Vanessa sounded highly put upon when she said “I had to read a book.” Later, a few of them wrote me letters about what happened to them.

  John Gruen, the large blond kid, wrote, “I listen to music every morning and that is just something that can’t be taken away from me. I gave up the digital fast in the morning because I need music during my travels or else it just won’t be a good day.”

  And Latisha wrote, “I started off thinking that I could get through it. Since I don’t do Facebook, I thought it would be easier for me than for other people. However, a few days in, maybe the second day, I started listening to music. I caught myself and stopped. But then I slowly started to text again. The fast didn’t go very well for me.”

  And others wrote in the same way. Need overwhelmed the digital fast—need for texting their friends, need for music so they could work or get through the day. But, as Mr. Leon said, they might be using their chosen instrument to avoid direct contact. Marina, who could be sandpapery in class, wrote, “It was difficult to stay away from Facebook and I kept catching myself pulling my phone out in uncomfortable situations or while I was bored. After the fast, I definitely realized how I use my technology as a way to avoid uncomfortable situations, for example, sitting at the lunch table and feeling as though nobody wanted me there.”

  Even in her note to me, she had a wounded tone. She was very bright, a good, potentially great student, and she didn’t have an easy life. I talked to her in the lunchroom. She lived with her father, who was Puerto Rican; he had a troubled past, and was now living in the back of a store that was rented out as a party space; he was a writer who had never been published. He was bitter, yet he was the one, she told me, who pushed her toward school achievement. Her mother was Dutch, a painter, a free spirit who didn’t believe in education—“She thinks it indoctrinates us into a system that is bad.” Marina had been shuttled back and forth between them, and had moved from one school to another. She had several brothers and sisters from her father’s earlier relationships, and she had lost, she said, a half brother in a shootout and a sister who had been thrown down a stairway. She worked part-time at three jobs, at a hair salon, a grocery store, and a not-for-profit, and she managed to get through Beacon, but she didn’t like the place, the first student I had heard say that. People made fun of her, she told me, because she was overweight, she was “different”; her direct, confrontational way was the opposite of cool. As we talked in the lunchroom, a few people sitting nearby smiled knowingly, but she plowed ahead, ignoring them, her words insistent, injured, but focused and brief.

  Technology could provide a way of escaping depression, funk, a recourse against social rejection and failure, a way of coping. Jordan wrote, “It was hard for me because I have terrible insomnia. On most nights I will read for a while and then I will watch a movie, but during the digital fast I read more than usual and I did some drawing and painting. But I don’t know if I could have done it for more than those two days, because drawing and reading are not as entertaining as watching TV and movies.”

  She was one of the three who filled up the electronic downtime by reading a book. She and her mom read every night. In the past, they had read Harry Potter books to each other, one chapter at a time, and on her own, she had read books from Mr. Leon’s reading list—Slaughterhouse-Five was her favorite. Jordan was the student who had read Ian McEwan’s Atonement. She was a genuine reader, one of the rare ones. And she also admitted that something outside electronic media exists. She rowed every day.

  Nino also knew that life went on outside the digital circuits. In his letter, he told me he did not participate in social media (he was contemptuous of it), but after saying how much he needed the Internet for music and all sorts of information, he went on: “I felt desperate, as if I was deprived of valuable information, and that, if this continued for a long time, I might go crazy. But then it hit me that all the things I felt deprived from were all around me. I can make music on my own; I don’t need iTunes to supply music to me. There are millions of books around me, and I can just go to the library, which is only a couple of blocks away, to find anything that seems of importance.”

  O marvelous boy! Perhaps he wrote what he imagined I wanted to hear. Still, I was impressed. The others, even Jordan and Latisha, sounded a little lost during the digital fast, decentered almost, grasping to find themselves—unstrung as well as unplugged. They didn’t get along better without the Internet; some of them hardly got along at all. But Nino had an actual experience. He learned something about himself, and good luck to him. He’s a little like John from the Savage Reservation, who arrives at civilization with his ideals of life acquired from Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet and hates the synthetic reality of the World State. In his own mild way, Nino was the individual fighting society.

  They were stuffing their heads with images, sounds, texts; they were rarely alone when they were alone, rarely just thinking. Reading for them was associated with homework, not with enjoyment, and these were ambitious, college-bound kids, all of them blessed with at least one parent who, however unpleasantly, cared enough about their education to get them into a good school. Once there, they did a lot of work. They took history, science, math, maybe an elective in the arts. They joined clubs, some played sports, some had jobs. They did their written work on computers, and communicated with Mr. Leon through the school website. And they certainly read serious books for Mr. Leon’s class. But even for these teenagers, with a few exceptions like Jordan, digits were a necessity and an obsession, and reading was a chore. They didn’t enjoy it. Coming back to Mr. Leon’s Huxley question—How had advances in technology affected
the individual?—you might say, at least provisionally, that technology had killed teenagers’ pleasure in reading books. I heard no expression of regret, saw no sign that they believed they were missing anything in particular. I left the digital fast in a sweat, depressed and worried, and I indulged the usual apocalyptic questions: Was advanced literacy coming to an end? What hope for a civilization that gave up on books?

  * * *

  Mr. Leon began the next class with some necessary straightening out: “The World State is actually the savage situation. The Soma group [the revival meeting that ends in orgy] is nothing more than a debauched party—getting high and having sex. Spiritually nil. In the Savage Reservation, the violence is at least human. The passion is organic, natural; the other passion is induced by a drug.”

  Cruelty, we agreed, was part of life in the Savage Reservation, but John Gruen responded to Mr. Leon’s remark by saying, “The World State is also cruel, because it’s depriving everyone of natural emotions.” Marisa Lopez noted, “We see the destruction of the individual” in the World State. She had been mostly quiet up until now, and Mr. Leon congratulated her for “taking a risk.” Suddenly, hands were raised, they were alive. Mr. Leon’s bruising questions about how they spent their time may have awakened them. They seemed, at last, digging into what they had read. Mr. Leon wanted to give everyone a chance, and when a bunch of kids raised their hands at once, he wrote down the names on his palm with a ballpoint pen.

  The discussion turned to happiness. The people in Huxley’s new world are drugged and sated. But is it real? Can there be such a thing as false happiness? “Leonardo,” Mr. Leon said, “would you rather be unhappy or falsely happy?”

  Leonardo said, “I’d rather be happy. Do I get to live longer?”—which didn’t quite answer the question. He was a boy who didn’t laugh much, dark, very handsome, a Latino of Peruvian descent. Annabelle, who talked a mile a minute, and who did her homework early and was bored without media, followed up with, “I’d rather be falsely happy. It’s just happiness.” She smiled and shook her head, as if the rest of us were stiffs. How would you know you were falsely happy? Yet it was certainly Mr. Leon’s belief that digital immersion, for one, was false happiness. Digital happiness was narcissistic, feel-good happiness, as meaningless as the endless sex in the World State. What a comparison! Yet I thought he had something of a point about false happiness. I also acknowledged, with a pang of misery, that in some ways I was no different from the kids.