I mean, you're a real person that wrote this, and I'm a real person replying to you. No one of this is not real. The image that I might make of you in my head and that you might make of me in your head are illusions, but so are the ones we make in "meatspace". Feel free to call the internet "siliconspace" or something like that, but it won't make it not real.
> Feel free to call the internet "siliconspace" or something like that
I think the word you're looking for is "cyberspace".
> but it won't make it not real
If I'm corresponding with someone via mail, are we inhabiting a postspace that is a real place? If I'm on the phone with someone are we inhabiting a voicespace that is a real place? If I'm reading a book, are the author and I in a space?
These are not places. These are media. It's communication as a phenomenon within real life, but to say any of these or the internet constitutes a place of equal primacy as the real world is just silly.
> I think the word you're looking for is "cyberspace".
That's the one, thanks
> These are not places. These are media.
I think that's just different ways to view things. I see HN as a place, and I go to it like I would go to the local pub or something. I see the discord server than I share with my friend as the same thing, a place. On the other hand, if I'm talking to someone on the phone, there's no "space". I think a good way to put it would be that if there's still something while no one is actively using it, I see it as a space.
A mail conversation would be more like a trail of letters, so not a place. I don't really know why, that's just how I see things. For a book, sometimes picking up a book (often with fiction) feels like going back to a certain place.
> to say any of these or the internet constitutes a place of equal primacy as the real world is just silly
I don't really understand why. There are lots of places in the world that are less important than HN. Of course you can go to the forest and touch a tree, but that doesn't make this tree more important than HN just because you can physically touch it.
There is a space of sorts with the phone, but it did take awhile to develop. My understanding of the early history of the telephone is that people conceived of it as like talking to someone in the other room. You can hear them, but not see them—but they’re there with you.
Now we do have very distinct telephone habits, a telephone style of speaking, etc. Try using phone inflection in person sometime; it’s very jarring. “Hey. Yeah. It’s Matthew. I’m sorry, one sec, I need to…”
In an abstractly similar way, a lot of HN comments share some qualities, even from different people (including this one).
Of course it's not real. This is Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation in practice. When you cannot tell the difference between a real person represented in the simulacra (i.e. a site like HN) and the simulacra being generated at will by a malicious actor (i.e. a simulation, fake accounts developing a history of posts, bots, guerilla marketing, etc.) then the smart person will recognize it for the un-reality that it truly is.
Just because it isn't real, though, doesn't mean that it can't be fun :)
I don't really see how this is specific to the internet. Sure, automated bots makes this worse, but is there a big difference between a bot and someone parroting opinions that they've heard and don't really understand? I guess you can have a conversation with that person, but it's often as fruitful as replying to a bot. These people exists in the meatspace, that doesn't make it less real.
> I guess you can have a conversation with that person, but it's often as fruitful as replying to a bot.
That's precisely one of the reasons why it's not real. Conversing in "meatspace" makes it more difficult to just tune out the other side, a "real" conversation is one where leaving the conversation is either tacitly permitted by the other side (by not following the person leaving) and at least bookended by simple social ritual ("I gotta go", "Nice meeting you", etc.). Baudrillard's point is that the simulacra (the discussion online) is no longer showing you that reality, but that too many people have lost the ability to differentiate between reality and what is a convincing simulation of reality.
> I mean, you're a real person that wrote this, and I'm a real person replying to you. No one of this is not real.
I agree that it's all real, but I do say: there is so much less basis of experience gained from interacting with one another on the internet today are much smaller. I would say our experiences gained are very much "less real" because of that. We're not going to recognize one another the next time we cross paths, in all chance, we're not going to have anywhere near the visual or auditory recognition or pattern matching an in-the-world encounter would have brought. The internet is real, people on it are real, but our experiences here are extremely glancing, only the most bare, stripped down contacts, and most of us interact with each other on a near-effectively-anonymous basis, as though everyone were wearing masks & using text-to-speech systems, wearing the same plain clothes. The bandwidth of experience we have with one another in these interactions is extremely tiny.
The internet & online communications is real, it is not an illusion. But nearly everything that happens here comes almost entirely out of context. It relies on us to access our pre-established bits of context to understand & discern meaning. The receiver here has far far far more power than the sender, and the sender has very few signals or images at their disposal to establish themselves, comparatively.
The internet today really feels like a forest in which the inhabitants, almost universally, remain in the dark.
Sure, it's real. Real electricity; cause and effect of pressing our fingers down and moving these tiny invisible machines.
I would love to express the emotion that I feel when I read the term "meatspace," but for all the machinations that I can dream up, I fear that the meaning would be lost as each of my futile attempts travel by wire.
It does a good job of distinguishing “reality” from “virtuality”. The Philip K Dick reference to “reality being something that exists when you stop believing in it” is better but a lot more verbose.
For me, reality is wherever I can communicate with other people. Reality is the inter-subjective (that is, the social constructs that people create and believe in together).
Incidentally, this is a major theme of the anime Serial Experiments Lain, which is what inspired me to think about the topic.