Hello again,
And welcome to a continued exploration of one of the themes I touched on in last week’s post: the weirdness facilitated by digital communication. Or, to use less ugly words than “digital communication”: “having to talk to people through screens all the time”.
This week I have been thinking about when it really started to be like this. And that made me remember when I was 15 or 16 and one of my friends was sacked from her job at a takeaway place with a text. She had texted her manager to ask about shifts and received the reply: “Der are no shifts”. My friend texted again, asking if this meant this week, or ever. They received the reply: “Sorry. Der is no job for you.”
This was a joke in our friend group for a good while. “Der is simply no job.” We would say. “Da job is gone.” We were so consumed with laughing at the ridiculousness of it we never really remarked on how cruel it was, to sack someone with a text using (even by then outdated) slang.
I think this kind of interaction has only grown crueller and more evasive since. Now I imagine they would either ghost her or block her number. At the other end of the employment process so many job applications are now mediated via the bureaucracy of endless forms, questionnaires and video assessments. And, if you don’t pass them, you often don’t even get an email saying so. If you do it rarely gives any kind of precise feedback. You must progress fairly far along a process to even be granted the opportunity to interact with another human being.
And it often feels the same when, as a customer, you are trying to interact with a service or buy something. So often when I order something online and arrange for it to be delivered it becomes a huge fiasco. It gets delivered on the wrong day so I’m not in and then it gets left somewhere and I can’t find it. And the delivery company says it isn’t linked at all to the company I ordered the thing from, so the original company can’t help. And there is no easy way to speak to the specific person from the delivery company who left it off, so all you can do is file a generic complaint and maybe get someone in trouble for no real reason, and perhaps then claim a refund.
Or they drop off a box with one item missing and then there is a big rigmarole trying to prove it wasn’t in the box, which you essentially can’t, because you could simply have opened the box and hidden the item you are claiming is lost. And all of it has to be mediated through multiple choice forms and automated systems. I know this is not the worst problem in anyone’s life. But still, why does it have to be like this? The whole point of a system like this is that it’s supposed to be the height of convenience, but it basically never is.
Dating has progressed along similar lines. In the early stages of our digitally mediated communication era the interaction between dating and technology would often be quite goofy or blooperish.
I remember once I got off with someone on a night out and gave him my mum’s mobile number by mistake. I can’t imagine any teenager doing that now. I don’t even know if they meet people on nights out, it seems like life all happens on TikTok instead. But anyway, I had an ancient phone that was always out of battery and broken anyway. It wouldn’t turn on to let me check my number. My mum’s was the one I drunkenly remembered and assumed was mine. He proceeded to text her “Out the night?” a fair few times after that and I pretended I had no idea what it was all about.
I did actually want to reply but I couldn’t figure out how to do it without telling him he had been texting my mum, which seemed incredibly embarrassing. And then once she was complaining about one of the mysterious texts and I had a brainwave and replied on my own phone. “It’s Rachel!! Got a new phone, what’s your craic tonight?” He never replied. Again, it was a joke in my friend group for a good while.
Another example I remember is when I was doing exams at university I would sit in the library every day, a few desks away from a person I fancied enormously. One day he poked me on Facebook. A little while later I poked him back. Then he poked me back and so on. It was stupid. But also sort of cheeky and silly. It made the long days of winter exam season, when I would sometimes barely see any sunlight, pass quicker.
Dating and technology don’t feel at all like a cheeky, silly combination now. I liked this Paris Review essay on how sad and cruel it is. Now it mostly seems to facilitate people broadly being kind of mean, and then disappointed with themselves and each other. I’ll be back to this theme I think.
Till next week xxxx
Some Things I Liked Recently
I went to see Meet Me in the Bathroom recently. It’s basically a documentary about the band scene in New York in the early 2000s, featuring The Strokes, Interpol and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But to describe it this way kind of undersells it. They’ve done a brilliant job of creating a coherent narrative (which I think documentaries can fail to do). They basically explore different kinds of success (instant, hard won, etc) through the different bands and create narrative tension that way. The Strokes are having huge, instant success, while Interpol play to empty rooms. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs struggle with the image they have created for themselves and so on. It’s really smartly done.
I have listened to this mix about 100 times already.
I met my book in the flesh for the first time!!! I love it!!!!!!
Der is no job
That Paris Review article is what I have been waiting to read for like 10 years. Thank you. <3
I found myself smiling at the Facebook poking someone sitting a few seats away from you in the library anecdote - honest to god good times!
I'm glad to have had that experience of the internet - those fun 2008ish days when the internet was a laff and not awful and even scary. Remember how much fun everyone would have sending around Youtube videos of like some weird American news segment remixed, and then everyone quoting/singing them all the time? Is this how everyone feels when they start to get old?! Nostalgic for things that, if you said it to a young person now, they'd be like ... and how was that fun ..
I don't know - I do think, though, that that combination of college + early Youtube / Facebook had a special innocence that's long gone.