The Circle_Dave Eggers

Summertime for academics often consists of catching up on all the reading that, during the school year, falls by the wayside. For me, the most rewarding types of books are ones that fulfill my academic interests while also offering me a good dose of entertainment and pleasure. 

There are, sometimes, those rare books that offer both pleasure and discomfort at the same time. Dave Eggers book, The Circle (2013) is one of these. 

Set in the sort of future, the novel revolves around the life of Mae Holland--a lower middle class girl who receives a scholarship to an exclusive private college. After graduating, she finds herself in a dead-end job working at a utilities company. Every one of her actions is lavishly praised for her above-average (but not overtly stellar or aggressive) performance. After working there for a few years, she wonders if this is all there is to life: middle management at an undemanding company, a forty hour work week, in short, mediocrity. 

Enter, The Circle, a tech company that has all but taken over social media and online advertising, at which Mae secures a job, through her privileged college friend. A kind of google meets 1984's Ministry of [      ] (enter your favorite one here...), The Circle is compared to an octopus with tentacles reaching out to the more remote places on earth. However, before we are introduced to the company's tendencies towards Totalitarianism, we are introduced to its lavish campus. Its on-site housing. Its organic and healthful restaurants. In short, its wealth and privilege. 

Mae quickly becomes a dutiful employee, however, as she starts to become enmeshed in The Circle's day-to-day affairs, she is also pressured to never quite leave her work life or identity behind. Her boss insists that she attend social gatherings, update her social network profile more regularly, and "ping" (Tweet, cough cough) about her life and activities. Eventually, because of an infraction that involves a stolen kayak, she is convinced to go totally "clear"--a euphemism for wearing a camera with audio around your neck 24/7. That is, a type of live feed of your life for millions of viewers: one part reality TV and one part aggressive publicity and marketing technique, Mae becomes squeezed ever so tightly by the tentacles of The Circle and its policies. 

But here's the thing that makes all of this even more frightening: Mae volunteers to enmesh her life with The Circle. Never is she told, straight-out, you must comply with this or that Circle policy. Rather, she is guilted, bullied, and coerced into becoming a human advertisement for the company. At the end, she is a true believer that sharing is caring, information is a right, and secrets are harmful--all slogans that The Circle promotes through their technology empire.

I was on vacation when I read this book. But, full disclosure here, I have just started a full time faculty position and I've been tethered--more than ever--to my email and phone. I sometimes answer emails from 7am until 9pm--simply because of all the work I have to do to organize and train staff and manage my pedagogy. As I answer emails, I fall into a sort of time hole, from which I emerge disoriented, hungry, and foggy. However, while I am in the midst of answering emails, I feel accomplished, happy, and engaged. The problem with technology and being "busy" is that we often give ourselves more work than is necessary and we ride dopamine rushes from one message/tweet/buzz to the next. Our brains on technology, as one NYT article suggests, leaves us feeling overwhelmed, stressed, dazed, yet itching for more. 

Alright, so, how does this relate to Egger's book? Well, at the beginning of the novel, Mae receives one computer with one screen to do her work as a customer service agent. She assists people with finding information about advertisement effectiveness and consumer buying patterns and then they rate their satisfaction with her service. If she gets below 100% satisfaction, she messages them asking what she can do to get her rating up to 100%. Of course, her ratings affect her team's ratings, affect their bonuses/jobs/careers at The Circle. What ensues is a type of constant feedback loop in which Mae helps customers, they rate her, she begs for higher ratings (to put it bluntly). The more emails she answers, the higher her average score goes, the more successful she seems. 

As the novel progresses, feedback becomes the main goal guiding Mae's behaviors. She "pings" constantly so that she can be "ranked" higher on her employee's social network. She devises more exciting and technologically suspect acts (crowd-sourcing the mission of finding people who don't want to be found and using drones to intercept them) in order to have more viewers when she becomes "clear." In short, every act, every thought, every feeling is captured, bottled, and presented, in the hopes of becoming more prominent in these online, digital spaces. 

A lot to think about, huh? 

Eggers doesn't really introduce fantastical behaviors or technologies. The Circle could easily be Facebook or Google--with their lavish campuses and amenities--social media operates in ways similar to in the world of the novel. Facebook and Twitter (among other, newer, technologies) enable people to create specifically crafted versions of themselves that totally erase whole aspects of their personalities and day-to-day experience. Lots of terms for this one, "Facebook Perfect" is one of my favorites, as is "Instafamous." Also, Facebook has been found to cause depression and Instagram cases envy--not surprising--but when everything is about "liking" only the good events in one's life, well, it's not so far off from Mae desperately trying to bring her satisfaction ratings up to 100% or to break into the top 2000 "most fun" employees on her social media profile. 

Now, many of us might argue that Mae and The Circle, have taken social media and the technologization of human experience too far: the company has called upon its millions of users to set up tiny and high quality cameras with live feeds in the most remote of places, the company also pressured all politicians into going "clear." However, with all of the social media scandals that politicians seem to provoke, the role of Facebook and Twitter in the Arab Spring, drone warfare and suspect pursuit, and the NSA spying scandals are we so far off from the moment when you can be found and watched from any remote spot on earth? Are we already there?

The Circle made me uncomfortable because it held a mirror up through which I could gaze at my own additions to technology: my itch to check my phone all the time, to read through emails though I was on vacation, my sadness when my life-changing moments were not "liked" enough on FB and Instagram. OK, the idea of going "clear"--having my life broadcast as a commercial and as a reality TV show--is terrifying to me but I wonder about people who were born after the creation of the internet, people who sleep with their phones under their beds and take thousands of photos of themselves to find the single, right, beautiful, one to upload to their profiles. People who might, in short, think less critically about the role of technology in their everyday lives. 

I've tapered off my Facebook use since reading Eggers' book. I didn't upload photos from my recent trip to the Pacific NW because, for the first time really, I am questioning why I upload photographs in the first place. Sure, part of it is to share my adventures with friends who live far away and whom I don't speak with often, but am I also bragging--look what I did with my summer, look how great my life is? I sure don't feel comfortable sharing unhappy events in my life--fights with my family, illness, anxieties... So, what then do I use social media for? I'm trying to re-evaluate my digital life. 

As for emails, well, I'm starting to experience that dopamine-influenced rush whenever my outlook pings. My heart races as I type quickly in response. I don't like it: that feeling. Also time to set some restrictions on email--not first thing when I wake up, not last thing before I go to bed, not twelve hours a day. Also, I am going to turn my sound off on my computer so I don't hear any buzzes, trills, or other sounds. 

The Circle will leave you feeling uncomfortable if you live in a technological world--don't we all really anyway? It will also leave you with dissatisfaction because the ending is a bit weak. There is mystery, there is verisimilitude, there is anxiety. Overall, it's a great read and I suggest every parent buy it (paperback, not electronic) for their child/teenager.