Why real life beats the online world

NEW YORK — I have two distinct yet overlapping lives. One is my substantive, everyday existence. The other is my online existence.

In real life, I have a few close friends. I get bored, I endure hardships, and I enjoy successes. I have my good days and my bad days.

Online, I have almost one thousand friends. I am continually satiated, invulnerable, and well spoken. I am the master of my own little piece of cyberspace.

For most readers, this double-life has become second nature. The lines between these two lives become blurred. But the way in which these lives relate to each other is far from clear to most of us, myself included. There is a lot to find attractive about online existence, but I’m learning that even those attractive aspects are not what they seem.

For the past four months, I have lived in an international community of students and scholars called International House, or I-House. In I-House, we live together in the substantive sense of the word. Our rooms are close, our doors often open. We share bathrooms, and many common areas. We eat together in the large dining room, drink together in the I-House pub. We share each other’s cultures at all levels, from the inevitable sharing of different perspectives, to organized in-house festivals.

I am a member of many online scholarly communities—groups that provide 24/7 connections with like-minded individuals. But despite being able to seek out and contact others in my narrow field, something feels “off” and superficial. We are meant to help with each other’s research, but are seldom pulled from our personal projects to do so.

The environment at I-House, however, discourages the common online compartmentalization between the personal and the collective. Besides sharing close living quarters, I-House allows us to share our common experiences. We are all embarking on new studies. We are certainly new to the city, and most likely the country.

A sense of foreignness pervades our daily lives, but I-House combats this foreignness by providing an element of familiarity.

As a collection of online profiles, we’re narrow, static. And even when we are dynamic, it is only superficial: a new publication, another conference, etc. As a community of students and scholars, our presentation is authentic. And an important part of being authentic means being unplanned, spontaneous. Or breaking down, and getting frustrated.

Online, everything about my presentation is planned, even supposed spontaneity! I never reveal failures, which would be like learning to play an instrument in public. But being invulnerable in this way means being isolated. The Internet can change people into pixels, which substitutes the substantive for the superficial.

Online experience obscures the many ways in which we are tied together, constantly affecting each other’s lives. This is ironic, since the Internet claims to connect us all together. But genuine connection requires vulnerability.

By encouraging us to project perfect profiles that communicate in cyberspace, the Internet’s world-wide grasp fails to touch the purity of meaningful human relationships. We care for people, not profiles. Only when the lines between these blur do we forget the important distinction, and its consequences.

These online scholarly groups, in part, are meant for us to help each other on our work, exchange papers, etc. But the relationships are often a tad too superficial for members to feel adequately invested in each other’s success. We know we are all tied together in a way that makes one person’s success a benefit to others. But we just don’t care enough about each other, beyond the surface, to take time away from our personal pursuits.

At I-House, through the sometimes awkward and alienating process of coming to know each other, we also come to care about each other. Instead of prepared profiles, I interact with real people, who bump my elbow while we brush our teeth, play their violin while I read, and help me carry my groceries home.

And I have realized that our scholastic interaction is bolstered by our everyday experiences together.

I-House provides something no cyberspace can: a sometimes messy but meaningful social vortex from which real people emerge before me. I-House overshadows its online counterparts, beating them at their own game. I don’t just respect residents as scholars, I care for them as friends.

It unsettles me to think that if I could have avoided or prematurely ended the interactions with a click of my mouse, I probably would have.

The deep bonds that emerge from I-House—from real life—contribute to personal and professional development in ways the Internet cannot match. These deep bonds are something online relationships can never touch, though their grasp might extend all around the world.

I am grateful that in the past, a motivated group of individuals got together, in real life, and built I-House. Back then, these individuals did not have the option of simply creating an online space for scholars from around the world to share ideas. Today, the choice between acting in our real lives and acting through our online existence continually confronts us. The lines between these lives will inevitably blur together, but we lose sight of their distinction only to our detriment.

Kieran Jimenez is a Canadian PhD student studying Political Philosophy. He is currently a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in the Philosophy Department at Columbia University.

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This piece is part of a new GlobalPost Special Reports/Commentary initiative supported by the Ford Foundation called "VOICES." The mission of VOICES is to present the ideas and opinions of those who are less frequently heard in the media, including women, people of color, sexual minorities, citizens of the developing world and young people. These voices will consistently discuss topics important to GlobalPost Special Reports including human rights, religious issues, global health, economic inequality and democracies in transition.