| Me today: I don't get social networking. Me as a teenager: social interactions on the internet--so cool and interesting. My hypothesis: social networks create a virtual world where we can construct the identity we hoped to construct. However as these networks age, mistakes in that identity come more often and suddenly that identity isn't so pristine. You can extrapolate this to anything that is on the internet and social from a simple forum to facebook. Now recent attempts are "hey, let's just delete stuff and that will model reality a bit better" but it doesn't. You've just changed the rules to an alternate virtual world, not necessarily made the virtual reality. My conclusion is therefore in order for you to experience life as reality you should stop trying to rely on a virtual copy to emulate those same experiences. When my friends get on their phones and computers and are so intent and focus on their digital identity, they can't experience what is real. The conversation is boring. The conversation exists in a digital virtual world that I'm not part of because I (now) refuse to export all of my time and experiences to that virtual world. I was lucky to learn these lessons as a child as the internet had just taken off and I (being a teenager) took advantage of everything it had to offer from online gaming to working internationally with others around the world. When meeting in real life, however, things felt a bit strange. It was like two strangers that were previously friends had finally had a real-world interaction. The awkwardness now became how to do we reconcile are real-world-selves with the virtual-selves we've known. The sad truth was that we couldn't easily. The internet allowed us to only focus on what we found important and ignore the rest of reality. I feel that more and more people are falling into this trap and it will be a rude awakening for them when they are much older. So is there a desire for such virtual worlds? Obviously yes. But the real question we should be asking ourselves is should we continuously be trying to feed that desire? |