Digital v. Physical

Your digital life is a real life, just like people now and in the past have relationships over the phone and before that, via letter. The emotions are real. The connection is real. The impact is REAL. Digital happenings are REAL LIFE. It is detrimental to community to deny that fact. Denial of the reality of what happens digitally allows people the fallacy of thinking they can do whatever they want digitally and it doesn’t matter. Stalking, hate comments, affairs…. this is not an exclusive list. I mean I’m not brainstorming about how to hurt people on the internet that is going to just happen.

I prefer a reframing of the whole idea. I talk about what happens in the digital realm and the physical realm, (I’ve heard some people call the physical realm the Meat Space, ha whatever floats your boat.) Neither is more real nor more important than the other, just different. Every person individually is going to have different relationships with those realms. Some people will be mostly interfacing with their life digitally and some on the other end will never use more than a telephone, no less social media or meme language.

This reframing also makes our methods of communication more neutral. It’s easy to be dismissive of other people if our interactions with them are digital alone, but that is still a real person on the other end. Thinking of the digital realm as just as real as the physical one makes our actions there real, too, because they ARE. This does not make the digital realm superior either, just different.

When you stop holding the digital realm up to the standard of real needing to be physical, you leave space for connection that wasn’t there before. This also means you have to hold yourself to a moral standard that accepts that your actions have impact, both good and bad in both realms. They are both real life. If we take that responsibility seriously, and treat each other with respect, both realms can be safer places to explore and make connections, both enhancing each other.