Stop pretending there’s a difference between “online” and “real life”

Figurational Sociology? Truth of Art versus Truth of Nature.... life imitating art; mimesis!? Clearly there is a huge entertainment value in the technology and its cross-talking over into the serious side, but I"m not sure there is anything anyone could do that is both constructive and effective in countering the natural progression of it all unless it can be predictive and exert influence early enough in progression of the problem. Augmented Reality is going to make things difficult perhaps but as much as it can reinforce existing bias, it can also distract and allow awareness to broaden - people do like discovering new things, especially if its painless or entertaining.

Indeed I think the virtual reality will exceed physical reality eventually, in much the same way dreaming reality can exceed physical reality - partially, but to such an extent it constitutes a 'place' alongside physical reality - because where it works it goes beyond the limits of physical reality. I know my dreaming reality is often better then my waking one, and same with virtual in some regards. So perhaps they all can work together to provide a better coverage over the concept of fulfillment. So the question might be how do we define fulfillment best! At the same time you would not want them to conflict or create vulnerabilities in each other.

So while governments and industry need to work to ensure security is sufficient at all levels, it is the user who also has to exert their own conscious awareness into decision making to understand where practical limitations should exist in using different domains of awareness. Such that it is stupid to have a nice dream while driving your car!! Or in the same way for making electoral decisions based on which person you think is popular with your friends. These things need to be compartmentalized and understood in accurate terms of reference (which is why I like mandatory voting because it avoids making it a popularity contest to motivate the larger poll attendance).

As Alex pointed out you don't die when you die online, so it serves no-one to confuse the language. Yes online is real, but its not real 'life' IMO. Life involves your body, so using your mobile device or computer is the 'online life' which happens to be real - the sitting at the desk with proper posture (yea right!!), the walking across traffic not noticing because your head is buried in Instagram, that is 'online life'.... or real online life as its a type of real life activity. What you do online is then the online activity. The activity you do online is not life, the doing of it is but not the stuff being done - but it does impacts life at least in regards to how you conduct your online life (not online activity). but as mentioned also it does often a lot more as these days it is a platform to interact with other societal functions like finance etc. I guess I feel it might be natural for this topic to jump on questioning the 'real', when I think its more about the 'life' in understanding a topic of is online life real life. So I do make distinctions, but try to recognize the nature of the activity, its platforms and domains and relational characteristics. Just to be properly confusing in clearing it up, IMO.

Online activity could be considered in the same discourse as long-range weaponry in warfare; close combat makes things personal. Engaging your enemy in face-to-face combat requires that you see the results of your actions. Not trying to belittle the horrors of war in earlier times, but with the advent of long-range weaponry, war has become impersonal. Enemies (or the person / people that you were told are your enemy) can be killed by the push of a button. What the other fraction believes to be the enemy is what you have made them believe through various means of communication. The fact is: oftentimes, the fractions, in reality, don't know anything about each other at all. What is killed isn't a person - it's a representation of a person, an idea.

Online communications as we know it today works similarly. Whom we perceive online isn't the person who actually sits behind the electronic communication device. It's a representation of that person. The degree of offset between the actual person and the online representation depends on the real person's willingness to convey his or her personality truthfully (or not) online. There are several difficulties arising from this:

- It's often impossible to tell how realistic an online representation is. Interacting with an avatar is risky for that reason, especially when various degrees of realism of representation are involved amongst interacting avatars.

- When others interact with an online representation, the real person behind it tends to forget that others do just that: namely react to an online representation that the person had created rather than to a real person. A representation can never include all aspects of a real person. While a real person may have flaws that are simply ignored or even welcomed in face-to-face interaction because other aspects of that person make up for them, an online representation can perhaps not achieve the same feat, leading in unexpected reactions that the real person finds hard to deal with

- in real life, a person is often forced to interact socially, to work on social skills, to confront issues with other people. Online, it's easy to avoid problems and the representations of people. As personal growth often involves the development and application of problem solving skills, especially younger people who may not have a full set of these skills yet are in danger of losing certain capabilities to deal with things in real life if they predominately interact through online representation.

Technology as we know it today doesn't allow us to truthfully represent ourselves online yet. This may be possible in the future, but until then, there's a huge difference between "online" and "real life" - a difference that is often unclear and hard to grasp for individuals. It should also not be precluded that every person has the capability to really grasp the reality of technology today. One example would be drone warfare - something that may to be the logical combination of long-range warfare and information technology / online representation to the West but is considered extremely cowardly and incomprehensible for those who are most of the target of such weaponry.

btw. I apologize for the poor language of parts of my post - I wrote that on a tablet PC this morning and wasn't able to improve on it later

Preface, I only skimmed the responses so far. I am responding to the OP.

As with all things there must be a balance. Yes there are real world consequences for actions taken online and people need to understand that. Things like "swatting" (calling in fake anonymous tips that your gamer opponent is a terrorist so that the SWAT team storms their house) and online death threats that people would never make face to face are terrible and need to be viewed with the same reality as if they were delivered face to face, in my opinion.

But we still can't pretend that being online and being "in real life" are the same. If it was then long distance romantic relationships would work just as often as other relationships. That is not the case.

That is not to say that online in offline carry different weight, just that they are not the same thing. To believe otherwise is foolish. That level of belief is what has led to the rise of hashtag activism and Social Justice Warriors. People believing that they can click and 'like' their way into being a good person or accomplishing things with their life when all they're doing is nothing. Real good can be done from behind a keyboard and screen but it almost never done without some work away from them as well and it is never done by simply sharing a Facebook photo.

As for the "mask" concept, appearing different online from offline, that is always true of any situation. People at work see me with a different mask than people at the comic book store, or the dojo, or at any number of other places and social situations. The closest a person can get to seeing "the whole, real me" is my wife because she also happens to be present at lots of those other things. Those masks don't have to be very different but to pretend they're not at least a little different is foolish. Everyone adapts to the situation they are in a little, that includes both online and offline.

tl;dr - They are different, but they can overlap and affect each other because all things are connected. Hashtag activism is useless. People act differently in different situations.

I've made a few great friends online, people I've never met offline, people who understand me and know me to the core more than many of my offline friends.

The only thing the internet grants us is a sense of anonymity, which enables us to reinvent ourselves in whichever way we choose. Some people hide behind this cloak of anonymity to act however their whims might move them; others use it as an opportunity for self-disclosure without fear of judgement.

In that sense, the online scenery can feel more real than the offline one, where in the latter some might succumb to the fear of judgement and social ostracizing, to put on their masks, while only being "true" online. Others might do exactly the opposite.

The Internet is simply a tool. It does not create an alternate reality. It's each user that determines how they make use of this tool. But there is no real separation between offline and online worlds. That's purely a matter of perspective.

I saw something the other day that was meant to be humorous, but struck me as somewhat frightening.

"As children we were told not to get into cars with strangers. We were also told to be very cautious and careful while using the internet. As adults, we use the internet to literally summon a stranger and then we gladly get into their car."

Online enterprise and interaction has fundamentally changed our "real life" behaviors. We put complete faith in machines and strangers when we order goods and services online and this is now normal. We don't rely on the local pharmacist or our trusted mechanic so much anymore. We plug our cars into a computer that tells us what is wrong and we can order medications online and have them delivered to us.

My brother was recently diagnosed with bronchitis via a webcam by a doctor he had never met who then submitted a prescription electronically to the drug store down the street from my brother's house. There was nothing strange about this interaction to him.

E-Harmony and other dating sites were once considered a place for the ugly, defective or hopelessly lonely to find others like them with whom they could settle. This is no longer the case. Online relationships may be just as likely to end up in a successful "real relationship" as meeting someone in the pub. Possibly more so.

The relatively recent emergence of "Identity Theft" is proof that our lives have become so reliant on electronic online activity that someone can literally become "you" online and do things that have very "real" consequences. There is no separating "online" from "real" when someone drains your bank account and you can no longer afford to pay your mortgage.

As our "online" lives and our "real" lives become more and more entangled, it is fair to say that the line is blurred and moving toward disappearing.

Senan wrote: "As children we were told not to get into cars with strangers. We were also told to be very cautious and careful while using the internet. As adults, we use the internet to literally summon a stranger and then we gladly get into their car."

I saw this the other day and literally laughed out loud at how true it is. I also refuse to use Uber and such things for that very reason.

Goken wrote:

Senan wrote: "As children we were told not to get into cars with strangers. We were also told to be very cautious and careful while using the internet. As adults, we use the internet to literally summon a stranger and then we gladly get into their car."

I saw this the other day and literally laughed out loud at how true it is. I also refuse to use Uber and such things for that very reason.

I agree... I use temporary email addresses, avoid sites like Facebook, and even use false information on sites still when signing up if it's not for something that definitely needs my real name. I had online fraud twice in a month last year despite all of my efforts to prevent it (I'm pretty uptight about that kinda thing) so 'online' me and 'real life' me definitely have different levels of disclosure.

"As children we were told not to get into cars with strangers. We were also told to be very cautious and careful while using the internet. As adults, we use the internet to literally summon a stranger and then we gladly get into their car."

As delightful as the idea of drawing pentagrams and summoning taxis is, this argument isn't much chop -

The assumption being, that as an adult we can assess the danger and react as required.
Another assumption is that people want money more than they want to do anything unseemly to you.



Every time you cross the road, you're assuming that I want to clean chunks out of my radiator less than I want to get where I am going. Part of being an adult is making that call

I saw this the other day and literally laughed out loud at how true it is. I also refuse to use Uber and such things for that very reason.

I will also assume you never collect your change from parking meters or vending machines then, as anyone who would use Uber to find victims, would also probably put used needles in places you put your flesh without looking


Humanity is dark and full of terrors

so 'online' me and 'real life' me definitely have different levels of disclosure.

It makes little difference.

For all the security systems and FaNcI$!@Aw0rbZ - With your full name and date of birth, a persuasive person can shit-talk their way through the customer service rep on the other end of the phone.

Most people don't bother, because the effort/risk/reward is no where near as good as running programmes and bulk online data theft activities - but don't ever feel secure.

Speaking from my own phenomenal (personal) experience, those who have "hurt" me the most have always been those who have done so in what you are calling "real" life. Flesh and blood people can lie, cheat and swindle just as well as some anonymous entity (who, incidentally has all the flesh and blood aspects of the less anonymous and distant ones) at a distance at a computer terminal.

The "getting into a car with a stranger" allegory is not too far from wrong. The extension of the analogy of wiping the chunks out of the radiator is applicable too. This because, there are thieves and swindlers in every market-place online and off. Moreover, in a world that has become "market" centred, almost all aspects of Life have become a market (e.g. online dating sites and nightclubs). What is worse though, and this is amplified by that risk that I was trying to allude to, is that whether we are ripping off people from across a counter or across the planet, it is the loss of our humanity and the acknowledgement of our shared humanity, that brings on (but also results from) the biggest rip-off of all ...

The stranger in the car, summoned or not, is dangerous, probably not because they actually set out to do harm, but because they believe the same lie they are re-telling. We've been "networked" for a much longer time than we've actually had networks... :whistle: