Imagine you want to go out to dinner with some friends after classes, maybe some cozy seafood place you heard about on a lifestyle blog, down PCH where you can admire the sunset together. You send out a flurry of texts and agree on a time, and meanwhile you’re checking what homework assignments you have due this week on Courses (or is it Sakai? You’ve never been entirely sure).
You leave your dorm for your first class of the day, scrolling through Facebook status updates as you go. You absently wonder what’s going on in the world, so you check your Twitter feed for the latest headlines. Kimye are having a baby.
How are your friends and family back home? You don’t know: You text them, or message them on Facebook to find out. (Maybe you’ll poke them, but seriously: who does that?)
Morning lectures are a drag sometimes. This is one of those times. Be honest, you discreetly text under the desk to pass the time.
(The election is long over, and with it, your interest in national politics. But during the past presidential season, where did you get your news and information about the election? Did you watch the debates on TV or did you stream them on YouTube? Did you base your opinions of the candidates on what you read on a blog?)
After class, your Twitter feed blows up with news of a car crash on southbound PCH. One of your friends texts you moments later saying they’ll be a few minutes late.
But you all do meet up eventually, and over dinner you realize that the majority of your interactions with these people occur online. It’s odd speaking to them in person, talking face to face and negotiating the flows of conversation over dinner.
Ooh, your food’s here. Looks good. You take a picture of your plate with your phone: You’re totally putting that on Instagram.
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When Morpheus offered Neo a chance to break away from the Matrix in the form of a red pill, the audiences of the time understood that the Matrix was an exaggerated metaphor meant to critique society, not portray it faithfully. But now, 14 years after that movie came out, the idea of an all-encompassing virtual reality dominating human existence has become more fact than fiction.
The virtual space of the Internet has become enmeshed with everyday, “real life” existence in a variety of ways. The digital sphere now comprehends the social, as increasingly interpersonal relationships between individuals become dependent on online channels to form and function. We build and maintain social networks that only vaguely reflect our day-to-day social interactions; we flirt and court one another with enigmatic text messages and teasing status updates.
On another note, the online face you present to the world at large can come back to haunt you: Employers nowadays will troll through the social media profiles of prospective employees, on the lookout for anything incriminating.
The online world has encroached on the realm of politics and culture as well. After the role that social media played in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, it’s hard to imagine that any presidential candidate in future elections will be successful without a robust online presence and social media strategy.
Political gaffes and fumbles, which might have passed unnoticed before the digital age, can now be recorded for posterity online and made universally available. Politically themed memes also played a role in our most recent election at shaping media narratives and public opinion.
Culturally, memes and other idioms have become enmeshed with broader American society and culture: Think text or L337 (“leet”) speak, your favorite memes, the lifestyle blogs you follow, Pinterest and Instagram. Internet culture comprises what is commonly understood as “geek culture,” and both have been thoroughly mainstreamed into American popular culture at large.
In the end, is there really any significant barrier that distinguishes our online lives and our “real” lives? And if there isn’t, is that necessarily a bad thing? Should we seek a magic red pill, to disentangle ourselves from virtual dependency — or should we bite the blue pill, and continue on our merry way?
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Apolitical is a blog that covers current events, politics and culture from a progressive perspective — bringing the world at large to the Malibubble, one post at a time.