People Still Care

Woman in couch, Portland: photo by Austin Granger, 23 January 2014

Life must be seen before it can be known but we are as the blind, before our lit-up screens, where then are our probing-sticks, to tap our way forward?

This imagination that life is easy to be borne, where does it come from?

The poor do not stand on ceremony over a little civility, nor does the mutilation of a compliment bring them low.

Crow (Washington Boulevard, Los Angeles): photo by michaelj1998, 27 January 2014

DC: In the last six years, you’ve tweeted just over 40,000 times —

Leah: Which is not as bad as it sounds! I think there’s an inherent discomfort in Twitter that a lot of people don’t like to address. It’s my favorite thing, watching a lot of people on Saturday night, tweeting. It’s like you’re yelling into the void. Who is here? That’s one of the reason we like bots so much. You know, a bot will talk to you whenever. People are checking in on Foursquare — “Hey, I’m here. Is anyone else here?” You know, there’s that desire to connect, and it’s sort of weirdly lonely to me. I remember one night on Twitter, I was in the bath, I’d had a little bit to drink and I tweeted “DM (direct message) me your secrets.” And I actually had to respond to so many secrets that I got put in “Twitter jail” (when Twitter prevents your account from tweeting anymore because you’ve reached a limit); I couldn’t respond to any more. I think there’s a really deep, and sometimes I feel it, too, this desire to be simultaneously connected but be very out of place. I think it’s true of a lot of people, not everyone. It makes me feel so deeply human: I can’t handle all this interiority in other people’s lives.

DC: How do you mean?

Leah: Just thinking about the conversations everyone’s having and how do you think about those people just … How do you feel, is there a place where you can feel you can just be you? For some people, Twitter does that. Not for me. For me, Twitter is turned at just enough of an angle where I can say a lot of things I want to say but not everything. I think there is that hint of melancholy that still comes through. Because there are people who say, “I want to connect with you.”

DC: They’re just getting at the surface of it, like this melancholy is just around the corner. We get glimpses of it.

Leah: Right. And I think that I’m pretty honest, and I’m pretty much just me, but I also think i’m “me” in a way that’s performative. I’m never just like, “here’s how I feel” and then let it all loose.

DC: So it’s that it makes sense and it doesn’t at the same time.

Leah: Yeah, I think that’s the beauty of being on Twitter. And that’s why you can’t explain Twitter and what you should or shouldn’t do on Twitter. Either that clicks or it doesn’t, and that’s OK. Because sometimes those elements shift out of place for me, and it gets very disjointed. And there are days that I can’t do it, and I can’t talk with this many people or engage with them. And I have to say a thing and go away. I think there are also times when it’s just off-kilter enough that’s comfortable, and times when it comes together and I think about how everyone is really great. And then it slides back out of place.

("I now work at a startup called Automatic... I do a lot of research, and because I trained as an ethnographer, I do a lot of qualitative research. I interview people, get a better understanding of their needs, of the products they use..." -- LR)

-- Seeking human connection in a virtual world: Leah Reich, social media researcher, interviewed by Noah Kulwin in The Daily Californian, 8 February 2014

Night ferry (Portland, Maine): photo by Robert Schneider, 3 November 2013

And the tech industry is taking other students as well: economics and business majors.

Sherry Jiang, a senior business major who worked as an investment banking intern at Goldman Sachs last summer, just accepted a full-time position at Amazon as a business analyst. According to Jiang, more and more business students are seeking opportunities in tech. She said the program she will be joining at Amazon is only two years old. Kayleigh Barnes, a senior majoring in economics, is in the midst of interviewing for a position at DropBox. She isn’t set on tech but said that it’s a job market that has always appealed to her as a UC Berkeley student.

“A lot of people are graduating, and they don’t really know where they can get a job,” Barnes said. “Berkeley has a close proximity to the Silicon Valley — the whole time you’re going to school, those are the companies you’re hearing about. And then the fact that the companies are so lucrative — that really seals the deal. You can make a lot of money at Google or another place and eat four-star meals while someone does your laundry.”

Interns working at Google and Facebook can make about $6,500 a month — a huge leap from the unpaid internships most undergraduates are taking on.

Victoria Lo, who is studying computer science and integrative biology and hunting for a tech gig this summer, said the money isn’t her reason for going into the field, but it can be for some.

“I met someone in one of my classes who said, ‘I just want to do this job or get a grand piano or a Lamborghini,’ ” Lo said. “And I was like, ‘Oh my god.’ This is what I want to do because it’s so much fun.”

-- Breeding the tech elite: Libby Rainey, in The Daily Californian, 8 February 2014