Getting Back to Reality

I don't hate the Internet, and I'm too young to be nostalgic. But, I do believe that actions speak louder than words, a handshake is more powerful than a Tweet, and a smile is more important than a smiley. While we're busy obsessing over our invisible actions, there's a whole world at risk of being neglected.

"We are creating a technology that will create a new world," said Renny Gleeson, speaking at the TEDxUSC conference on Monday, March 23rd. "Please, let's make technology more human, not less."

It's amazing and scary how quickly we have allowed technology to dehumanize us. I remember my first email account, which I created when I was 13 years old. I checked it once a month. Now, a decade later, messages route to my inbox every half hour or so, and I read and reply from the palm of my hand--even while I'm in bed. I watch TV over the glaring face of my laptop. I talk to friends thousands of miles away, in different continents and time zones, via a pop-up box in the right-hand corner of the screen. More and more frequently, I learn of deaths, and births, in my circle of family and friends via the Facebook news feed.

Human routines have changed dramatically and many of us now spend the bulk of our "reality" in a virtual realm. And it's not just emailing any more. The Internet is no longer just for practical purposes. In fact, maintaining profiles and updating Twitter in the feverish way many people do takes real dedication to online life. For some, it's innovative. For others, it's vanity.

"It's tempting to dismiss Twitter fever as a passing fad, the Pokémon of the blogosphere," writes Alessandra Stanley in her New York Times column. "But it's beginning to look more like yet another gateway drug to full-blown media narcissism."

What began as a technology for communication, for outreach and interconnectivity, has become wholly self-indulgent. We are transitioning into the Age of Narcissism. The end game in the new, narcissistic Internet age is not focused as much on receiving information and broadening understanding, but getting attention, grabbing followers and becoming a prolific "mindcaster." Ironically, what seems to go unnoticed is that there are many, many talkers and very few listeners. In the end, it all adds up to a mass of meaningless static. White noise.

But while we continue to expand this invisible space, what tracks are we making in the real world? Are we becoming less "real," or does it just mean that the definition of "reality" is changing?

"If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain," says Morpheus in the 1999 movie The Matrix. As a perspective, The Matrix philosophy deems reality relative. What does it matter if you sit in a real or virtual café, if you send e-vites and e-cards instead of paper and cardboard ones, or if you romance prospective partners with digitized images and HTML code instead of subtle glances and sighs?

To me, it doesn't feel like the Internet is blurring the lines of reality. It feels almost as if the world is being divided, not integrated, into separate realms, physical and virtual. As half of the world sinks deeper into Internet obsession, the other half gets more visceral, more requiring of action, to the point that it's almost unbearable that so much time is dedicated to an inanimate being. What ultimately suffers is our relationship with the world, and each other.

For example, while I stare into this piece of luminous furniture, there are two people living on the grass verge outside my apartment, using a discarded couch as a home. This morning, a man wearing nothing but holey grey socks and a dirty, damp-looking blanket passed me on the street. A woman with matted hair and a weathered face collected plastic bottles from the dumpster.

I wonder, if for every minute we spend living our virtual world, we are sacrificing something in our real one. It may be as simple as eye-contact, or as strong as a conversation. It may be the difference between dedicating your life to bettering the Web, or bettering the World.
But all the moments spent staring at a screen must add up to a whole lot of distractedness from our surroundings, and the people in them. All those online companies making billions of dollars must be distracting a few of us from careers essential to nurturing human life, like teaching, social work and activism.

For every minute I'm looking down at my iphone while I'm walking, or plugging my ears with a personalized playlist, I'm missing the simple interactions that make humans feel connected. I'm at risk of becoming nothing more than a disembodied head, with a wireless adapter inside my cerebellum. I'm exchanging sensory experience for invisible existence.

Obviously, I'm worried. I don't want to be invisible. I like to feel, and I value meaningful action. But many of us are at risk of drowning in disposable meaninglessness while the real world suffers. Even human interaction, the most basic level of society, has been digitized to the point that we spend more time staring at screens than each other. And to what end? Fleeting moments of online glory?

Nothingness is accumulating, swallowing the land, like in The Never-Ending Story, but without the rolling, dark clouds and thunder. This storm is invisible, and its only sound is the tapping of a keyboard.

But I am not alone in my fear. Already, there are voices speaking out in concern for what the Internet is becoming, and more importantly, what we are becoming because of it. Back in 2007, Andrew Keen warned in his anti-Internet polemic, The Cult of the Amateur, that the Internet is "cannibalizing culture." Keen argued that Wikipedia and blogs were diminishing the quality of information and threatening knowledge itself. "On a Web where everyone has an equal voice," writes Keen, "the words of a wise man count for no more than the mutterings of a fool."

Soon afterwards, social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook were being blamed for accelerating humanity's intellectual demise. Now, Twitter is the source of evil.

"It's like stalking someone, but without the inconvenience of sitting in a car outside their house on a cold, rainy night with a loaded gun in your lap," says Brian Unger of NPR.
"Somewhere, amid all this connectivity, some people still do things," writes Loren Steffy for Chron.com. "And that doing, that accomplishment, matters more than simply talking about nothing. Me watching you doing nothing still equals nothing."

The critical voice that first appeared in Keen's fairly obscure book has now infiltrated the mainstream. And as the Internet continues to age and we gain in retrospective wisdom, criticism of the technology and its broader implications will grow.

Our children, the post-Internet generation, will complain about our online activities. They will tell us to "Stop being so virtual and get real," according to Morely Winograd, co-author of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics. Then, maybe a new brand of hippy, hippies 2.0, will emerge, intent on re-connecting with sensual experience, physical communication and the terrestrial world. Their motto: Actions speak louder than AIM.