*This post was originally written as an assignment for the course of Digital Anthropology at Amsterdam Univeristy College
I will go on and state the obvious: this year of pandemic, isolation, and distance has put a great strain on everyone’s mental health, to one extent or the other. Especially now, I find myself particularly emotionally overwhelmed by all these months of lack of a real-life education, a stable social life, prolonged physical interaction with my family, and even just casual interactions with strangers. It is a moment in time of extreme vulnerability, for me, but also for many (if not all) of the people around me. And, I have to admit, I’ve found myself crying in front of a screen more times than I wish I did. Let me tell you why.
Deep crying
Crying is perhaps one of the most intense manifestations of human emotions out there. Some of us cry only on rare occasions, and some of us (me included) are just generally more inclined to do so. Since it seems that we live in a world so highly saturated with forms of digital interactions, it seems only natural that we might find ourselves crying in front of, or because of, a screen. Couldry and Hepp refer to such saturation as ‘deep mediatization’, an advanced stage in the process of entanglement of our social world with media technologies (2015, p. 3-5). Media constructs our social and cultural realities, an instance especially evident in everyday practices (p. 8) but also important when looking at physical activities turned digital through processes of mediatization (p.11). Physical action, such as working out or cooking, becomes intertwined with communicative action, so a walk becomes a closed ring on a smartwatch, and using a specific shape of pasta demonstrates awareness of current trends. But crying feels a bit different than these instances of bodily practices turned digital. I’ll try my best to be vulnerable now and tell you about my crying and why it (sometimes) happens online.
sad slowed songs to cry to (pt.1)
I just had a long day of attempting to study at the library. Anxious and stressed, I came back home looking for a comforting activity that could take my mind off of my own worries, while also being mellow enough not to betray my sad-ish mood. Some people in this situation might prefer to blast sad songs, as demonstrated by this YouTube video with over 17 million views of one hour of slowed and reverbed songs, with a comment section filled with fellow depressed listeners. I instead usually go for heart-breaking, sappy, and corny teen movies. It is a guilty pleasure of mine, watching the coming of age movies with tear-inducing plot twists to bowl my eyes out in the comfort of my own bed. From the classic and shameful watches of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Paper Towns, All the Bright Places, or The Half of It, to the more nuanced Edge of Seventeen, Eight Grade, Submarine, Y tu mamá también, or Normal People, which is a bit different in quality and format, but that nonetheless is a comfort-crying watch for me. And not all of these are even so emotionally heavy, but I tend to cry easily so they work for me. So, I use my favorite movie discovery system gnod, a self-adapting algorithm-based website that has mapped thousands of movies (but also music, literature, products, and art) that can provide you both with movie recommendations based on your own input. I gave the website three random movie titles belonging to the aforementioned list, and it provided me with around 5 or 6 movies I hadn’t heard of. I gave a quick look at their trailers and landed with Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s 2015 comedy-drama Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.
I locked my front door, and also ‘locked’ my phone by selecting the do not disturb mode, which blocks notifications and incoming calls. Gnod was right. That movie perfectly fit with what I had in mind, and I found myself crying for around 15 minutes in front of my bright laptop screen. I was crying at fictional characters of a movie I had discovered through an all-knowing recommendation website, watching their dramas unfold on an illegal streaming service filled with bitcoin and porn pop-ups, all while having my phone at hand to look up once again the movie trailer on YouTube to check if people in the comments shared the same kind of sadness with me. Through my digital devices, I was able to build myself a space and time for emotional vulnerability. Just with a few clicks, I turned my bedroom into a place where I could physically release emotions. And while streaming a movie does not substitute a talk with a friend or a meeting with a therapist, the large number of views on those sad song playlists and the types of comments left under sad movie trailers indicates that many turn to the digital to tune in with their emotions.
I don’t know why I’m crying in the club right now
Another time in which I was crying (or almost) online was during a group call on Skype. My family connected from four different parts of the world, as we all sat down in front of our laptops talking for about one hour. I am quite bad at keeping contact with my family, so they were pleasantly surprised to see me join in. It was just another call, like many others we had been having during the pandemic. My grandma asked me how I was feeling, and told me I looked as if I was not working hard enough. I saw a comforting look from my sister on the other half of the screen who knew how much I had been struggling with keeping up with university. Everyone updated each other about their most recent activities, making jokes or discussing the latest news, but also sharing complaints or worries over new covid restrictions placed in Italy. My internet connection was unstable, and for a second everything froze. I sat back and observed my screen. I could see myself in each one of those rooms. I could close my eyes and almost perfectly reconstruct the spaces that were reproduced on my laptop, imagining how it would feel to be there, right then, with them. While it is true that digital devices help breach distances and differences in time, and while it is true that one might feel a sense of co-presence because of such mediation, it takes nothing but a second of reflection to see the emptiness beyond the screen. My eyes started watering, but thankfully no one noticed. The camera hides quite more than it reveals, so no one could tell that I was crying all alone in front of my screen. My laptop, which moments ago was the cause of my tears (maybe to be more exact it was the fact that the laptop is the only option for such a connection), also acted as a shield to protect me from an otherwise difficult conversation.
So what?
These two observations of my practices of dealing with and displaying emotions through crying, might superficially not have to do a lot with digital media. You watch a sad movie, and therefore you cry. You miss your family, and therefore you cry. But there are a couple of things at play here that go beyond simply feeling emotional. Mainly, I’m thinking about how my practice of crying in front of a screen is dependent on digital configurations of time and space.
Here comes the theory
The relational nature of space makes it so that “space cannot be exclusively understood in terms of place or locality” (Couldry & Hepp, 2016, p. 86), as the construction of space is partly achieved by actors’ building of material connections. Deep mediatization has complicated this process. Space can be constructed digitally, as face-to-face encounters have become only a part of the set of possible interactions between humans. And if face-to-face encounters were already no longer the norm of social interaction well before the global covid pandemic, the past year of restriction have exacerbated the extent to which we want and need to socialize in the online domain (Couldry & Hepp, 2016). What this means for sociality, is that the places in which we perform it have been shifting to media platforms (Couldry & Hepp, 2016, p. 91), which sustain many different ways in which people can interact with one another and orient their selves in relation to a public. One can socialize on Twitter by talking to a wide unknown public, construct a proto-sexual relation with a cam-girl based on the paid interactions afforded by OnlyFans, or link oneself to an old colleague on LinkedIn to translate offline networks into countable digital ones. Twitter then becomes a place for comedy, OnlyFans for intimacy, and LinkedIn for work. While these places do not replace a real stage, bedroom, or office, they allow for personal encounters and therefore create a sense of space imbued with social meaning.
These digital spaces have been extending how one can relate to oneself and to the people around you. Family, and the way it is performed and practiced at a distance, is an especially great example of new spaces for social interactions. Digital media has made it much easier for transnational families to maintain ties, allowing for both more frequent connection, and for multiple types of communications, all contributing to (re-)establishing familiar relations. The ritual space, for example, can be reconstructed digitally (Couldry & Hepp, 2016, p. 93) allowing relatives to participate in ceremonies despite of distances or health circumstances. In Tuscany, where I am from, Good Friday is celebrated by the burning of olive tree branches, a ritual I was able to ‘attend’ along the rest of my displaced family because of a Skype call.
But also more mundane relations have carved out a space in the digital realm. During the past year, I have found myself working out with my cousins through video calls, as well as exchanging recipes and pictures of food that I had recreated from audio messages by my mother or grandma. But this ability to deal with spatiality has also made families much more contingent on equal digital availability and access to digital resources (Couldry & Hepp, 2016, p. 88). The glitch that froze my screen made this dependency on internet cables and Silicon Valley software evident, breaking the illusion of annihilation of space and time which one might temporarily feel during a video call. The reality of distance, often mediated and moderated by the ability to connect in real-time with a support system in times of crisis, can cut deeper and provoke deep emotions such as my crying. Tears were falling from my eyes because I could picture myself in the same space as the rest of my family, while actually there was a huge disconnect and distance between my space and their space, both physical and mental.
Dependence on equal engagement with connective media does not only mean that members of my family must all have access to a stable internet connection to prevent these glitches, but also that we all have to share an understanding of what that digital meta-space means for us. To my grandma, a family-wide skype-call is a space in which we should share our true and real lived experiences and emotions, but for me, it is not the right place in which I can talk about my struggles and cry. Hiding my tears by exploiting the lack of definition of my laptop camera was a way in which I could opt out of a social interaction. It was a way to reappropriate the meta-space and to select when and where I was okay with being emotional while connected digitally. A movie watched in streaming in the comfort of my own dually locked bedroom (physically and digitally) became a ‘meta-space’ in which I could cry in comfort away from the eyes of friends (physically and digitally). No one would enter my room to find me bawling out in front of my screen, and no one would disrupt this safe and emotional space I had created by blocking out possibilities of digital social interactions. This practice of selection (Couldry & Hepp, 2016, p. 113) allowed me to lock a digital door to many possible forms of social interactions which come from simply owning a smartphone. I often feel obliged to not turn off my phone at any time in case a friend or family member is in need. I also feel obliged to have email notifications on, even beyond usual working hours, in case I get an important message which I would not want to miss. But letting oneself be available at all times can induce a lot of stress: “keeping all channels open means permanently orienting oneself to the world beyond one’s private space, and the media circulated within it” (Couldry & Hepp, 2016, p. 113). Practices of selection let us select from our (digital) environment things that we allow and not allow to enter our (digital) space. By selecting the do not disturb mode, I do not allow messages and notifications to interrupt my moment of planned emotional vulnerability while allowing more urgent calls because if someone were to call me two times, one right after the other, the phone would ring. By going full screen on my laptop, I cut out bothersome pop-ups, while maintaining a level of connectivity (or an illusion of it, Couldry & Hepp, 2016, p. 113) through my phone. I could be fully immersed in the movie, while also taking being able to connect with other watchers by looking up its reviews on letterboxd, allowing me to feel reassured that my extended crying was not personal but shared.
Closing my laptop, wiping tears off of my face
My first instinct after almost crying during that call with my family was to close down my laptop. Shutting off the connection, remaining for a second disconnected from the vast digital space of possible interactions, and just sitting there on my own. It didn’t take much longer for me to re-open it, go to my email, and check the tracking of a package I was waiting for. There is a time and space for crying, and digital media allows me to create or dismantle such a time and space fairly quickly. I can always grab my phone and comfort-scroll through TikTok, my latest digital pacifier that soothes me with its perfectly curated page that only shows me chill cooking videos, cats in places where they shouldn’t be, or stupid jokes based specifically on my own sense of humor (or the one the algorithm thinks I have). I could read this as one of the many advantages of the tech revolution. I am now in control of when and where I can cry, and just with a few clicks, I can manage my emotions by managing my Chrome tabs. But that, of course, is not the truth. As Sherry Turkle says, “human relationships are rich, messy, and demanding” (Turkle, 2015, p. 21). By allowing myself to use technology to control whether or not I want to cry, or whether or not I want others to see that I cry, I betray conversations with others and with myself. Conversations that are hard but that are fundamental in developing healthier relations with our own emotions. As the restrictions of the pandemic will be lowered, I can only hope that I become less dependent on digital media in having such difficult relations. I can’t wait to go to a cinema and cry so loud people look at me weird. I can’t wait to go home and cry right in front of my grandmother, facing her questions and my own emotions head-on.
References
Couldry, N., & Hepp, A. (2016). The Mediated Construction of Reality. Wiley.
Turkle, S. (2015). Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Penguin Press.