Have you ever seen the word Swalk?
If you read, say, Biggles-style media, if you’re interested in World War 2 period media, you might have seen it, S W A L K, somewhere, usually on a letter, sometimes graffiti, maybe sometimes mentioned aloud. I saw it on a BC comic, by Johnny Hart, which isn’t an archive worth diving for an example. I can just imagine Hugh Lawrie saying it, in that doleful, soppy, romantic, I-know-I’m-the-stupid-person-in-the-room way of a Blackadder or Jeeves And Wooster episode, though I’ve no idea if at any point he says it. I know it came up on an episode of QI — part of a technique that came up in World War 2 for communicating a crude message to the recipient, in a way that looked deniable to anyone overseeing it.
See, you might see, on the back of an envelope, the letters SWAK or SWALK. It stood for ‘Sealed With A Loving Kiss.’ There were others like BURMA and NORWICH – and they were, mostly, filthy. It’s a touch of human contact during a period of extreme deprivation.
There’s a concern that The Youths are addicted to their phones. This is a stupid concern, mostly expressed in my experience by grandparents on facebook or in the case of the ones related to me, their forums. The fear is that these young people are caring about their phones, which they express to their friends, on facebook, which they access with their phones. This is so banal that the Lamb Council ad about Lamb Bringing Everyone Together (as long as they aren’t, for example, the 11% of the population that consider themselves some measure of vegetarian) made the same joke.
The thing that youths are engaged with, on they phones, is never really specified, except when it’s criticised in terms of relationships. Online friends, bad friends, abusive friends, cyberbullies, the potential for Online Stalkers or worse, and of course, the ever-present fear of a Digital X-Friend of some variety. After all, the line goes, they’re not real friends, and for a while there, how can you trust that they are who they say they are? This position, of uncertainty seems to be most prevalent amongst the population of the planet who give their real name and address to Facebook in the name of contacting grandchildren who then leave facebook.
When I attended the first wedding of people I knew who met and married online, it was easily twenty years ago, or something like that. It was surprising, to me, because he’d flown from England to be here, which just felt, in hindsight strange. When I was a young teenager, I had an internet girlfriend. We DM’d each other phrases like ‘kisses you’ and graduated to phone calls and then writing each other hand written letters we’d scent with our scented deoderant. Lords that’s dorky. Anyway, this was to me, a very important experience, in learning about myself and learning things I’d later regret deeply, like, you know, don’t fall out of contact with a friend because you’re embarrassed. These romances are not remarkable, they are extremely normal. I’ve even talked about how a lack of teen experimentation with romance can result in people having bad or stunted experiences in their adult life that means they’re not well equipped to handle ideas like ending relationships that are going badly.
This idea, then, and its introduction seems almost completely unnecessary to me. Most people I know are okay with some form of online dating, certainly if you’re shy and pining and there’s a difficulty in being materially present because you live in a big expensive county and have limited means. There are a number of polycules that have never met, and love has been expressed through sighs and songs on discord without ever needing something as gauche as a hand gently gripping a fistful of hair.
The thing that makes this stick in my brain, and the reason this draft has hovered around for a year for me, though, is that this is one of those many enduring times when a thing that’s called new is just another thing that’s old, and because the form of it has changed people are confused by it. Before there were IRC datefriends, there were phone partners, before there were phone partners there were CB Radio buddies, before there were CB Radio buddies there were letter-datings, and a lot of that letter writing involved people who hadn’t met yet, because they were introduced to one another by letter.
Setting aside the nobility and landed gentry of the 19th century, who featured a huge number of arranged marraiges and a network of related people getting married to people they never met and who courted in an entirely transactional way, setting that aside, the 20th century had a lot of people who moved around and got travelling and connected and hitched and made families with people based on introductions by letter and an ongoing relationship through letter-writing. In fact, there are quite a few boomers who only exist because of those relationships, so they could grow up and point to people doing the same things on their computers forty years later, and call that weird and inappropriate and unnatural.
This is a thread that runs through culture. There’s a position in the work of one Johan Huizinga, in Homo Ludens that games are fundamental to culture, that if you can’t play, you can’t make what we recognise as a culture. And play is… complicated. Flirting, for example, flirting is play, right? You’re trying to communicate an idea without saying the idea, you’re trying to discover a boundary without crossing over it, and when you discover a boundary, that boundary can then be renegotiated on the spot. It is, a type of play. And relationships don’t exist to be entirely purpose driven. They are serious, but they have that same play element; this is nice, do we want to do more of it? Do we want to change this? Do we want to commit to more of it?
These are the things I think about when I see someone complaining about something new that young people are do, because so often, the thing they’re doing isn’t very new at all, and is just the latest permutation of a very familiar human thing that is new to you.