The Artificial Line Between Online and Real Life

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Andrew Couts takes a philosophical turn in The Digital Self: Our online lives are our ‘real’ lives, but his message has very real and practical import in our lives.

It was just four years ago that I trained my eyes forthrightly, and my fingertips actively, on social media.  In 2008, a friend added me on Facebook, but more than a year passed before I took the emerging juggernaut seriously.  I was determined, even as a neophyte, to participate and interact and also to observe and learn.  

To Couts' point, I realized back then that the distinction some of my friends made - online friends versus real friends - was a grossly artificial one.  One was no less real (or unreal) as the other.  In time, I said to them, they will just be friends.  

But Couts carries the point deeper:  that of a division in ourselves and what we do online versus real life (emphasis, added):

It’s difficult to say exactly when we began referring to “the Web” or “the Internet” as something other than “real life.” (I would guess it started at the very beginning.) But it’s clear we haven’t yet given up the practice. A quick search on the Internet’s record of steaming consciousness (a.k.a Twitter) shows that thousands of people still disassociate what happens online and offline. We have “Internet friends” and “real life friends.” We have interests that we only explore through the Web, and those we never include in any status updates. We can be one person offline, and someone else entirely on the Web.

We become victims or perpetrators of this false online-offline disconnect constantly – not just during national tragedies or manhunts. We bitch about our bosses on Facebook, thinking it will never come up in future job interviews. We create entirely separate identities, believing that our various selves will never cross paths. And we toss around horrific names in comment sections, forgetting that there are sensitive human beings on the receiving end.

You might argue that social media apps, like autobot replies, work automatically.  You might also point to those idiotic love or money spam messages, and think these cannot be real.  But there are absolutely persons behind these robotic replies and messages, and there are most certainly persons receiving these.

Enter:  Jimmy Kimmel.

The best comedy, I think, does two seemingly contradictory things all at once:  It makes us laugh, and it makes us sad.  This is a stroke of genius on Kimmel's part to humanize the people some of us tweet about and tweet with.  Those people who delivered these mean tweets can hide behind Twitter handles, as Couts points out, but in a way Kimmel has 'de-anonymized' them.  He moves new media (Twitter) into the tried-and-true old media of TV, which ironically many of us watch on new media (YouTube), and shows us how celebrities took these mean tweets.  Many of them were truly good sports about it, and took it in stride with calm confidence or fitting humor.

But some looked hurt, though.

So Kimmel dissolves that artificial boundary between online and real life, not fully of course but sufficiently enough, for us to think twice, I hope, about how we carry ourselves on social media.

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD