In John Cheever’s 1947 short story, The Enormous Radio, Jim and Irene Westcott get a new radio that broadcasts everything going on in their neighbors’ apartments. At first it’s entertaining, but Irene quickly becomes stressed and upset from listening in on other peoples’ private lives. “Why do you have to listen to this stuff if it makes you miserable?” Jim asks.
The couple ultimately get the radio fixed so that it stops picking up their neighbors’ frequencies, but when Irene and Jim start fighting about her new-found superiority over the neighbors she’d listened in on, she begins turning the radio knob, wishing to once again find comfort in her eavesdropping.
Facebook, Twitter, Instragram, YouTube — all of these serve as our modern enormous radios, giving us intimate windows into the private worlds of others. Sometimes these windows make us feel self-righteous, as we see the weaknesses and flaws (or perceived weaknesses and flaws) of those we once respected, but they often have the opposite effect, too.
In The Enormous Radio Jim and Irene’s neighbors don’t know they’re being heard, so the Westcotts get a genuine, candid view into their lives. With modern social media people will curate whatever kind of image they want, making our glimpse into their “real lives” nothing but a staged show, yet one we still compare to our real lives as though it were authentic.
This kind of watching, judging and comparing has been a part of our social behavior for a very, very long time, and it’s not realistic to expect people (particularly young people) to be able to simply turn it off. Just as Irene had trouble turning off her radio 74 years ago, we struggle to turn off our feeds today. And just as Irene struggled with the sudden dissolution of normal social boundaries, so do we struggle with the ever blurring lines between our public and private personas, between what’s authentic and what’s not, and how we judge ourselves and others within this new context.
It can be easy to say that this demonstrates why we should get off of social media, but unfortunately it’s not that simple. Our lives have become exponentially more intertwined with the digital world over the past few decades, and there’s no indication that that’s going to change. Younger generations have never even known life without the Internet and social media, so disentangling their organic selves from their digital selves is even harder.
Although it’s difficult, there is value in doing the work of better understanding this new social structure and developing new expectations and norms. We owe it to ourselves and our children to not just give up on digital society, but to find the best and healthiest way forward.
