March 29, 2024

The Internet Is Reality, and the Real World Just a Content Source?

This paragraph I read I found interesting:

Comedian Bo Burnham said in his new Netflix special Inside, “The non-digital world is merely a theatrical space in which one stages and records content for the much more real, much more vital digital space.” This sounds like a joke until you realize it isn’t. It is tempting to believe that “the internet isn’t real life,” but the reality is that for vast swaths of people the internet is the realest part of life and offline life is often seen simply as a store of natural resources from which we may mine content for our real, online performance-lives.

It’s like what Postman wrote back in 1985, “Americans no longer talk to each other; they entertain each other.”

This is truer today in 2021 than it was in 1985.

Social Media Cannot Bear the Weight of Friendship

And while I’m not convinced that the author is right in terms of whether it is because we do not want intimacy, I do know that we can easily mistake what is typed to us and what we read as reality and miss the real person.

I’ve left almost all social media, and I find that I don’t miss it– and that it’s strange just how much other people are into it. Even texting with friends seems to not have that same connection.

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