You mean there's a difference?

As many as 21 years ago I was already outrightly questioning whether there was still something tangibly distinguishable between the lives we lived before the internet and the ones we live online. That question was an ongoing subtext in many of the more than 100 columns that until then had appeared. In the February 2005 edition I noted this outright and wrote that most of the columns until then:

have reached the conclusion that they're really not very different at all.

One month later I brought the issue of online versus "real life" to what might be called my home turf - education, and wrote that:

there seems to be an unwritten law that states that in "real life" we know how to distinguish between truth and falsehood, while on the internet we're always in danger of trusting sources that we shouldn't.

But as much as the question of critical thinking seems connected to the digital and the internet it's far from a new question. Television, and advertising in general, should have compelled us to deal with that question well before we went online. Fake news weren't invented by the internet, and the fact that so many of us view it as such only proves how weak those thinking skills have always been.

It's my guess that "presentation of self" is the arena in which we still feel that there's a clear distinction between our offline and our online lives. In October 2006 I admitted that:

My Boidem persona is often tangibly distinct from my "real life" identity.

But I didn't add the obvious - that I don't have only one "real life" identify. I know my Goffman and Garfinkel (whom I referred to when I quoted Oscar Wilde) well enough to acknowledge that it's more accurate to write about "identities" in the plural - and that's true both for those that are online and those that are offline (or "real"). I was, however, angry when at the funeral of an aging friend I knew face to face his online friends suggested that they knew him better than we, his offline friends did. They knew one particular aspect of him, as we, his offline friends, did though I'm quite sure that we had a more complete picture of who he was.

As I reviewed the numerous references to "real life" in these columns I realized that over the years very little changed in how The Boidem related to the online/real life dichotomy. (A bit to my surprise, I never used the acronym IRL.) Basically, it didn't think that there really was one. I admit that to a large extent it makes sense to expect that as the internet became more and more an integral part of our daily lives the distinction between online and off diminished. But though that may be the case for many people as they increased their online presence (or at least their internet use), it appears that almost from its inception The Boidem recognized that online life was simply one additional aspect of our full lives. Online was no less "real" than what we previously knew as "real life". The fact that sometimes we presented ourselves differently, or sometimes felt that we wore different personas, was a natural aspect of the reality of living in a complex and multi-dimensional world. I hope that The Boidem was able to express this.

Go to: It was thirty years ago today