didn’t feel like surveillance. It was a high- tech scrapbook that we thought the adults would never see. Wanting nothing so much as to look cooler than we felt, we used social media to discuss and document our misdeeds. The world was new. Just as Lewis and Clark wouldn’t have ventured west of the Mississippi without sketchbooks and cartographical equipment, we carried digital point-and-shoot cameras to house parties – lest history forget that one summer night someone’s parents were out of town, and we took turns drinking gin punch from a turkey baster on the patio. On the Sabbath, as was then the custom, we uploaded the contents of the cameras’ memory cards, came up with captions – in this instance they were mostly variants of Baste your face! – and tagged our friends, then waited around for them to tag us in turn. Being a true “digital native” mostly means having been aware of an online audience for as long as you’ve been aware. Facebook opened for public use the year I started high school, and Instagram entered mainstream use four years later. So my peers and I are not true digital natives. But, while we technically remember life before likes, posts, and friend requests, it was a stage of life in which few of our outward actions had any lasting consequences. And, crucially, we were among the first not to imagine how we’d reinvent ourselves once we got to college. Instead, our first impressions on our peers were pre-written. We already knew how our future classmates would find out who we’d
been before: We scrolled through our tagged photos and wall posts to judge whether they were an adequate summing up of our lives thus far. I distinctly remember concluding – with self-conscious pride in those Saturday nights on the parentless patio, lost to memory but alive online – that, yes, this digital distillation of me would do just fine. (At around the same time, when I first read that Isabel Archer, heroine of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady , “often surveyed with complacency the field of her own nature,” I recognized myself and my friends, reading and rereading our own social media profiles and liking what we saw.) My pioneering micro-generation were the digital prelapsarians. The paranoia that’s sobered us since had to be foisted on us from on high. It didn’t really take at first. As I was recently reminded, it took the dean of students discovering our vast and publicly searchable cache of party pictures. In consultation with the school’s college counselor, the dean prepared a PowerPoint slideshow. They called a special assembly, assured us that every elite college’s admissions director was always watching, and proceeded to click through tagged Facebook photos of upperclassmen sipping from a handle of Smirnoff by someone’s pool and day students posing with a keg by an abandoned ice house in the woods. There was far less shame, we all knew, in being included in the party girl PowerPoint than being left out. The only photo of my friends and me was tragically tame: One of us had what could have been a hand-rolled cigarette, while another held up a hardcover copy of Philip Larkin’s High Windows , and
There was far less shame, we all knew, in being included in the party girl PowerPoint than being left out.
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August 2019
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