the blurred lines between online space and reality
marshall mcluhan a media theorist, coined the term 'global village’ in 1962. it is the idea that people throughout the world are interconnected through the use of new media technologies.
it’s so funny to think that ten, twenty years ago someone who spent hours and hours staring at their screens was considered a recluse. interacting solely with people online, these people were seen as antisocial and awkward- people to be pitied, to secretly think you’re better than. now, the average person born after 1996 spends 7 hours a day staring at a screen and it’s completely normal. but i’m not here to give the whole “phones are bad!!” spiel your parents give you when you so much as dare to glance at a notification during enforced family time. as a chronically online person myself, i know that this isn’t inherently a bad thing. we’re closer than ever, citizens of a virtual village who are connected to each other in seconds. it’s crazy when you sit and think about it. how we have the technology to reach millions and millions of people, in a matter of seconds, all in tiny computers that fit into your pockets. technology is cool.
except for when it’s not.
there’s a dark side to the freedom the internet allows. the anonymity and detachment from the real world the internet provides is erasing the humanity of those around us. go on twitter or tiktok and scroll for a while, i promise you it won’t be long until you stumble across a video or image of someone recording a stranger- often without their consent. i remember earlier this year a tiktok influencer by the name of jackielabonita posted a video of her trying to get pictures at a sports game, when some girls behind her started mocking her.
this video got millions of likes and hundreds of thousands of comments in support of Jackie, the internet banding together to uplift her. this in itself is innocent, but things got out of hand as the angry mob against the “mean girls” in the video grew more and more, and vigilante justice was pursued for their crimes.
the two girls were harassed for weeks, doxed, had letters sent to their places of work, everything you can imagine. when i first saw the video i empathised for jackie and thought the girls were being unnecessarily rude and judgemental, i scrolled the tiktok comments and laughed at all the people making fun of them. i still think their behaviour was uncalled for, but the backlash they received was out of proportion, to put it lightly.
it was a typical case of projecting. people watched the video and through of all the times they have been bullied. they started pinning personality traits and backgrounds to these girls that they know nothing about outside of a thirty second snippet. they’re incensed by others who feel the same way and are hungry for power, the power they wish they had over their adversaries offline, to push back and get some sort of satisfaction out of a revenge that is not theirs to claim. all through the shield of a screen. these people would never actually show up to the girls’ workplaces and demand the termination of their employment. that’s wrong, that’s too far. but how different is it really? offline, you get a sense of their humanity. online, you can pretend that they’re one dimensional characters who are programmed to only act this way, so every bit of backlash is justified.
even when posting a stranger to praise them, you open them up to an audience they never consented to perform for. i’ve seen tweets praising a stranger's figure, the comments full of people dehumanising them and turning them into just a sexual object. these ‘compliments’ are borderline sexual harassment. this is dying down now but comments like “i bet it’s bubblegum pink” used to be under so many female influencers comments- referring to the colour of their vagina. isn’t that insane. just imagine saying that to someone in person. why do we allow there to be such a difference in how harassment is treated online versus in real life?
It’s actually very simple.
whether we’re willing to admit it or not, we do not see the people on our screens as real. it's a hard pill to swallow, but it’s true! we weren’t built for this. being aware of the consciousness and humanity of the people around me is already overwhelming enough. sometimes i walk through a busy city like london, passing hundreds of strangers on the street and it blows my mind that every single one of these people is an individual like me, with their own lives and their own thoughts. when i went to see sza in a sold out o2 arena, i took a minute to look around. twenty thousand people, all in one place. all with their own social circles, dreams, hopes, fears, lives. it’s unbelievable, but in person it’s undeniable. their humanity is evident. online? not so much. it’s so interesting watching this happen in real time too. a person you are sitting across on the train losing their autonomy right after you take a picture with them in it. a background character to your story.
just the existence of the acronym ‘irl’ is fascinating to me. in real life. what makes offline spaces more real than online ones? if when we’re offline we’re in real life, what is the online space to us? where are we spending that seven hours of screen time?
it’s not easy to behave ethically in a world that thrives on the morally grey.
it’s actually very hard. consistently reminding yourself that in order to make the world a better place, your participation is needed. the world wide web- our global village. every single person you see online is real. they have their own thoughts, their own feelings, their own reactions to comments you made and forgot about months ago. i encourage us all to navigate interactions online as if we’re speaking to the respondent in person, as if we’ll face concrete consequences. every day the veil between virtual and reality is getting thinner and thinner. what type of global village citizen do you want to be?