FaceTime ≠ Face-to-face Time
What my 2-year-old taught me about the limits of technology connecting us to one another.
Recently, I flew to Los Angeles with my project team to wrap up final delivery for a client. My son — who just turned two — knew I wasn’t home for a few days when I’d travel for work in the past but wasn’t old enough to understand much else. The revelation he and I both had while I was on this trip was a changing point in both of our perceptions of how technology will bring us together at times when we’re (sometimes achingly so) far apart.
Weston is all about FaceTime. He FaceTimes with his grandparents enough now that whenever he hears the phone ring and can start seeing himself in the video onscreen, he starts to smile and get ready. He knows he’s going to “be seen” through the phone and is about to talk to his grandparents.
I’ve witnessed Weston learn how to use my phone, seamlessly, through his obsession with watching short videos of himself interacting with the world and the people around him. He can swipe to the next video, press play, and swipe away notifications without blinking an eye. He’s developed an understanding of the immediacy of technology and I’ve developed an expectation of how easily he can adapt to it.
So, when my team arrived in LA and we were waiting in line to get our rental car, I slipped away for a minute to FaceTime Weston before he went to bed. Even though he’s a pro when it comes to FaceTiming relatives, this was our first FaceTime with each other — the first time we’d see each other inside a screen and weren’t in the same physical place at the same time. I anticipated that he might be sad I wasn’t there to put him to bed, but his reaction was a lot worse than that. When he saw me on the screen his face crumbled in confusion. He reached his fat little arms up towards me inside the screen, gesturing like he always does when he wants me to pick him up.
This shattered my mama heart, obviously. But it also showed me something I may seldom, if ever, see from my son again: his confusion about how technology will keep us together, even if we’re physically not in the same place. He may never know a day in his life without technology woven through each of his relationships and within his own perception of the world around him. The reaction I saw from Weston was his rejection of the lack of physicality in the connected convenience FaceTime gave us. We were “there together” while I was standing outside LAX and while he was back home in Austin, but it wasn’t enough, and it wasn’t a true substitute.
I know he’ll soon learn that Mom isn’t in the room and can’t pick him up when I call over FaceTime, and it will cease to be a big deal as he becomes used to it. But I’ll never forget his first reaction to that experience, and that he wasn’t delighted to see me — he was disappointed in the connection technology was offering him. Because as amazing and unbelievable the tools of technology become, they’ll perhaps never evolve us out of the inherent human need to physically “be there” with each other, and honestly, I don’t think they ever should.
