WIKARYASZ

A frustrating part of surviving the social landscape of Gen Z is that there are silent, digital cues to affirm one’s loyalty to another. These cues are often not explicitly stated. To understand these cues one must first betray the social paradigm, suggesting to the tribe that you are either A) ignorant or B) a terrible person.

One of these important cues is location sharing.

There are several ways that people can share their location. One way is through location sharing apps, such as Life360. This is popular for families to keep tabs on their children and loved ones. Life360 tracks driving speeds, sends alerts when certain people leave certain locations, et cetera.

Smartphones allow users to share location directly from the phone.

Snapchat, a favorite among college students, allows you to share location with everyone you are friends with, even if they don’t share their location with you. This feature is called Snap Map.

The important thing about location sharing is that the sharing often does not have to be mutual. But the one sharing has to take steps to actively share their location via whichever app they choose.

I was made aware of how important location sharing was among my peers when I mistakenly turned off my location sharing with one of my roommates at college. The third roommate had informed the other two of this and the household had convinced itself that I was purposefully not sharing my location with roommate three for various reasons.

One reason was perceived that I was being vindictive in only allowing two roommates to see where I was at all times of the day. The second was because I was racist.

Yes, I know the ladder was an escalation but let me explain.

I was the only white girl living in the apartment. One of my roommates was mixed, another was black, and the third roommate was from Costa Rica.

They were, and still are, very beautiful women and I often felt inferior to them. I was not as culturally interesting as them and I could feel the disconnect from day one. This was also the first time I had lived with anyone other than my family.

My assumption is that this disconnect led to everyone else’s conclusion that I was indeed, racist.

The TL;DR is that the household had convinced itself that I had purposefully turned off my location because of the aforementioned reasons and when I tried to explain to them I did not understand how location sharing worked, they did not believe me.

Another time when location sharing caused turmoil was when my friend in college participated in a very toxic situationship.

For those who don’t know what a situationship is, it is usually a friends-with-benefits relationship though respective parties are likely not friends. The relationship functions solely for random hook-ups, there is zero to limited communication, it is usually emotionally one-sided, and often involves games of blocking and un-blocking, location sharing and location unsharing.

I don’t know why anyone would willingly enter into such an arrangement, but that is beyond the point …

Said friend made it explicitly clear that this relationship was only for hook-ups and nothing more.

I knew better and I think she did too.

We worked together and I walked into the office one Monday to her crying in the intern room. She explained how she watched her situationship leave a party with another girl and then saw him at one of the dorms on Snap Map.

She drew the same conclusions I did and I’m sure readers will too.

I didn’t know how to help her. I could not empathize with her situation as I felt she had knowingly hurt herself.

Towards the end of my stay in Lansing I had a group of four friends. It was actually a group of three, but the third often brought her other friend along for the ride.

Eventually, friend three had a falling out with friend four. Friend three expected us all to stop sharing location with friend four. I complied, though it felt odd to do so.

The act of location unsharing felt like an exile ritual — somewhat like blocking a failed suitor on all social media platforms to avoid any reminder they exist.

The ending of relationships used to be throwing a person’s belongings out on the lawn, not a virtual slap in the face. An ousted partner would move north of town and you two would run into each other at the grocery store now and again for the next twenty years. In extreme cases, legal intervention might be required or across state relocation.

The severing of ties among my peers requires more ritualistic, deliberate actions to erase digital footprints. The emotional is intertwined with the intangible where closure does not exist.

For example, I recently blocked someone on Snapchat and immediately felt their absence even though we had only hung out once. They had refused to spend time with me in person on multiple occasions.

However, Snapchat includes a feature for paid subscribers to be notified when a specific person watches a story. I turned on this feature and for a long while it felt like they were engaging with me as I documented my life through photos and videos.

I felt as if I was Fitzgerald’s Gatsby throwing lavish parties for Daisy to see across the lake.

“Maybe if I do something fun, he’ll want to participate next time,” I thought. “Maybe if I smile bigger in this photo, he’ll think I’m pretty … if I can’t have you in my life, I want to know when you are watching my life.”

It was very satisfying to see them view my story multiple times a day, sometimes within minutes of me posting something. At one point I believed they had story notifications set to alert them of when I posted anything to my public story.

I’ve had this person blocked for a few weeks now and I feel significantly more lonely than I was when said person was ignoring me — because even when they were ignoring my messages I could see they were watching me.

After some reflection, I found this reality to be unnerving. We talk about the importance of privacy, safe data sharing, and the fear of China influencing our social media feeds. But we still choose to be surveilled by our peers.

Orwell taught me that surveillance is bad, and Big Brother is something you run away from, not towards. So how has it become a prerequisite for intimacy to know and see and have access to another person 24/7?

And why do we willingly accept this as our reality?