Mollenkamp 1

Allison Mollenkamp
EN 309
Dr. Amber Buck
16 September, 2015
Between the Lines
The easiest way to make a play terrible is to have nothing little happening in between the
big things. All the little things like a character fixing their hair or fiddling with a pencil when
theyre not speaking make up what is called stage business. Far from happening only onstage,
this kind of filler action is constant in everyday life. Keeping a digital auto-ethnography journal
for two days helped me notice my stage business. The vast majority of it occurs on a screen.
Whether its scrolling through Facebook or opening and then not reading the endless stream of
University wide emails, I spend my in-between moments on my phone. Despite the fact that
society seeks to frame this intermittent screen time as narcissistic and time-wasting and I at times
do feel guilty for being engaged with something other than the physical world around me, I value
social media as a method of maintaining relationships across distance and filling the traditional
role of daily diary.
Throughout the two days I kept track of my technology use, I felt guilty because older
generations have effectively demonized social media. Newspaper opinion columns and, perhaps
ironically, their online counterparts, are filled with a seemingly constant commentary on how
smartphones are slowly but surely bringing about the downfall of the human race. How can one
help but be self-conscious about texting when it might be sending the world to hell in a handbasket? Seeing my use of social media written out so clearly made me feel bad about it, and on a

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partly conscious level I used it less. Over the two days of my experiment I used social media and
other digital communications for 92 minutes, usually in one minute intervals. However, on
normal days I will at times spend several minutes scrolling through a site, at times even if Ive
read some of it before. Along with the widespread idea that digital interaction is somehow
counterfeit, there comes the idea that time on social media is time that should have been better
spent on other activities. I cant help but question what I could have done with those ninety-two
minutes instead. Should I have organized seeing some friends in person? Should I have done
homework? However, when I remember that my moments on my phone were usually no more
than a minute, these fears are quieted somewhat. They are also quieted when I analyze my
journal and realize the purpose of my social media use.
One of my main uses of social media and digital technology is to maintain relationships
where an in-person component has decreased or gone away over time. Throughout the day, I
travel mostly by myself. I dont have a lot of friends in my classes, so outside of class discussion
I dont spend much of that time interacting with people. I bike to school alone. Except for one
day a week when I eat lunch with my boyfriend I usually eat meals alone. Rehearsals at night
and talking with my roommate in the evenings are my only real in-person social time during the
week. However, through Facebook, texting, and GroupMe, I am in constant contact with a
nation-wide web of friends Ive known throughout the years. For instance, one of the few active
social media instances of my two days was to comment on a high school friends Facebook post.
In the post, he came out to all his friends and family. He came out to me several years ago, but
when we were still at the same school we often talked about his reasons for staying in the closet
with most of the world. Seeing him finally feel free to be himself and being able to show my
support felt like a closing moment to those years of covert conversation. In that moment, social

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media allowed me to continue a relationship with a friend who is far away when physically I was
alone.
While Facebook is more suited to grand life-moments, GroupMe has allowed me to
continue a set of relationships in which in-person meetings have decreased over time. Last year,
my dorm room was, much to my continual surprise, filled with a gaggle of freshman engineering
students, sometimes for hours at a time. Despite their half-hearted jabs at my status as a lowly
English major, we all became fairly close friends. This year, with all of us living in different offcampus locations, the dorm-room get-togethers have come to an end, but the conversations they
were comprised of have continued through GroupMe. Over the two days of this experiment, 15
percent of my social media time was spent reading messages from my friends in this app. On that
platform, I fulfill much the same role I did in the dorm room. I quietly observe for the majority
of the time and save my own commentary for smaller groups. In this way, my digital interactions
defy the stereotypes of fake identity online and help me to continue genuine relationships.
Perhaps most likely to counteract the stereotypes of digital communication as a negative
part of life is my use of it to maintain family relationships. During my two day experiment, I
texted with both my immediate family and my grandfather. These conversations were not long,
but they served the important purpose of sharing my college experience with some of the people
who got me here. My conversations with my grandparents over text message are an outlier in my
communications in that they are the closest to traditional letter writing. My grandparents want to
stay informed about my life and I want them to know that Im learning and enjoying college. We
do this by texting, even if it is only once a week. Can even the stalwarts of the hell in a hand
basket group begrudge technology when it means a girl talking to her grandparents?

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Digital technology also allows me to fill the purpose of a daily journal. While most of the
people I texted over the two days were much more sporadic, serving either to answer specific
questions or, again, to maintain distant relationships, such as with my grandparents, the main
person I texted the two days of my little experiment was my boyfriend. We see each other often
enough to maintain our relationship, so texting serves a different purpose with him. Ive never
sustained a diary or journal, and often I come home so late that my roommates are both asleep.
Texting my boyfriend throughout the day fills those gaps. I can narrate the stories of my life as I
see them and in the evenings I can go over the day as I would if I came home to dinner with my
family. This use of technology serves an almost therapeutic purpose. I can reflect on the day and
on myself through narrating it and reviewing not only the events but my reactions to them.
Frequently, I realize Im in a bad mood because my texts have become increasingly whining. At
that point, I can evaluate the situation and find a way to put a positive spin on things.
The narration and relationship maintaining I do through social media and texting are time
filler just like scrolling through Facebook. If Im with friends in person and we are engaged in a
conversation, I would feel not only rude but redundant in pulling out my phone. This also
explains the gaps in my journal during classes and the meetings I had on Thursday. Despite all
the fear-mongering of the older generation in newspaper articles, I am not replacing real social
interaction with online conversations. More accurately, I am supplementing it. There is one
exception to this rule for me. If I am I n a large group of people, which as an introvert I find
rather draining, I will often be half engaged in the group and half engaged with social media. The
large number of friends on social media are distilled down to a stream of articles and comments
that I can process within the context of my own mind. This serves as a partial escape from the
chaos of large groups, while still allowing me to participate in real life interactions.

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In order to maintain relationships at a distance and to reflect on my life as I would in a
journal, I use social media in between the main lines of my life, despite the cultural guilt this
causes. Overall, I think my use of social media as real-life stage business is pretty normal for my
age-group. Where our parents and our grandparents pulled out a newspaper or magazine, we read
articles our friends share on Facebook. While the college students of yester-year waited by the
phone for a guy or girl to call, we have the pain-staking will they wont they in our pocket at
all times. Life onstage is painful to watch when actors dont find something for their characters
to do in between speaking or directly interacting onstage. The same rings true for our day-to-day
lives as well. We all have down-time, even if just for little one minute intervals throughout the
day. For me, those moments are spent, usually happily, behind a screen.