Where's My Bubble?

We just took a quick day trip with the board of directors to an amusement park, one that has become a favorite of mine after roughly 17,000 excursions there as a class trip chaperone. One small incident reminded me of one reason we are having a moment about vouchers and choice in this country.

To understand the story, let me tell you a few things about regular life for the board of directors. The twins are now 7 and get very little screen exposure. In the summer, they get one "show" each on a daily basis (less during school). They don't have devices of their own, and they don't get to share ours. They do have screen time at school. But they are used to watching shows from tv or disc. Also, they are very accustomed to hearing some version of "no." 

So. We booked a hotel room for the night before. When we're doing longer traveling, we usually have a laptop with us, which, time permitting, let's them have a daily show. But this time we didn't. All we had was the cable for the hotel tv.

They were absolutely baffled. Why could we not just watch their shows? Why wouldn't we pull up Netflix? Why was this program in the middle and what did we mean, we couldn't just go back to the beginning and start over?  

None of this was angry or entitled, but about 1 part bemusement and 2 parts frustration with the grownups who were not smart enough to make things work the way they are obviously supposed to.

We have raised and are raising generations of citizens who are used to living in a bubble, a bubble in which they control most of what goes on, how it goes on, when it goes on. 

I have used before my tales of being a band bus chaperone and the effects of technology on shared space. Ages ago, the inside of a band bus was a shared space, as exemplified by the music. Ages ago, you got whatever the driver picked up (or could pick up) on the radio. Then debates over what tape to play. The use of boom boxes to break the space into smaller spaces. And finally, we arrive at the age of walkmans and ipods, in which what was once shared space is not shared at all.

Most of our popular culture in the 20th century was shared space. If you skip Super-Bowls and political debates, all of the most viewed episodes on tv are from at least thirty years ago; an entire generation has grown up with no idea of what Must-See TV is. 

I'm not waving my old man fist at technoclouds. Things change. But I do think that sometimes we overestimate the power of deep policy decisions and the long slow game for school choice and the privatization of education and underestimate the degree to which a generation has been affected by growing up in their own individual bubbles. 

Of course, the thing about bubbles is that they're fueled by available choices, and has always been true, the number of choices you have available is directly proportional to the amount of money you have to spend on them. Bubbles favor the haves way more than the have-nots; in fact, bubbles are often about the haves keeping the have-nots out.

Nor do I think society benefits from a shortage of shared spaces. But shared spaces are at odds with the commercial, mercenary consumer mindset, a mindset that encourages us to scrimp and save and hoard the resources we need to make ourselves the best damned bubble ever. Gimme my fully furnished neo-liberal bubble, baby.

Robert Putnam in The Upswing suggests that maybe we will figure out the value of shared spaces and bounce back. And maybe we will be moved by the loneliness of tiny gods; certainly the signs are that we are feeling it. Lots of folks like to point at social media and smartphones as culprits, and I have long resisted that notion because I have witnessed what a huge connective power that social media exerts, how it allows people to stay in contact with a myriad of human beings. But it does so as part of the process of building that bubble, and I think that bubble, that lack of time spent in shared spaces, is the more likely culprit in the steadily worsening mental health of younger generations (as well as, suggests Hannah Arendt, the growing attraction to totalitarianism). 

Public schools have been one of the great shared spaces in this country, shared not only because every child goes there, but because every taxpayer participates and contributes.

Preserving them as a shared space is crucial to our collective health. Some public school defenders link public schools to democracy, both as contributor and benefactor, but I think the issue is deeper than that, more fundamental our health as human beings. We need shared space to be fully, healthily human, even if we have to share that space with people with whom we disagree. Maybe even especially if we have to share the space with those people.

How to do this when so much of the tide is sweeping away shared spaces? How to make the argument to folks whose position is a simple, dispassionate "Why should I have this particular feature in my world when I don't want to and I don't have to?" 

There is a big bundle of questions to solve here, and I don't take them as simple theoreticals, because my sons and my grandchildren are the people who are growing up needing the answers, who are having their shared spaces devoured out from under them, and I worry about them reaching the point when their bubble is not a preference, but a necessity.