Conduct and consequence
Some people believe that the virtual world and the physical world can be made equivalent. That these worlds can collapse into each other, that being 'on' Twitter can be substituted for being 'in' the room. That we can smoothly oscillate from existing in one form and existing in the other.
However, we have evidence that this belief is false. Our experience of mediating the physical world through the virtual has made us mean, exchanges less authentic, and a society less social.
When we give in to this belief—that the virtual world is akin to the physical world—we lose everything that could not slip seamlessly between these states as we did. The things that could not flatten for the screen, the spaces that could not render. We find ourselves trapped in a circle, doomed to rediscover the hard-fought lessons of the physical world, asking where did privacy go, when did civility disappear, how did we lose ourselves?
Some people believe that the virtual world and the physical world are disparate quantities. That one world is imaginary and the other real, and can never be reconciled. A Tweet is just meaningless, ephemera, if it was never seen, it may as well have never happened. The only constructions that we should let matter are those that reverberate in our physical world.
This is also false. Everything in the virtual world has the power to affect us. The virtual things may sometimes have more power, their aphysical properties of limitless reproduction, widespread distribution, and long-lived impressions can have tremendous impact. Last year's off-colour tweet can get you fired and your employer's new software can get you retrenched.
When we give in to this belief—that the virtual world is unmoored from the physical world—we erase the virtual's potential to transform our reach and deny its potential to damage us.
That the virtual can stand in for the physical or be totally rejected are ultimately dead-end reductions. Not only are they false but they are dangerous guides for integrating the virtual world into one’s daily life. Treating the virtual as a replacement eliminates essential codes of social life while treating the virtual as inconsequential denies its real consequences.
So what is the most productive understanding we can have of the virtual world? It is one where we look outside of the virtual for the essential constructions that orient social life but still pay close attention to the virtual's consequences. It is to embrace everything that the aforementioned reductions get rid of and to be comfortable with the ostensible contradictions this creates. To consider a virtual world that is both too intangible to maintain conduct and too real to have no consequences.
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This piece borrows heavily from Graham Harman’s The Third Table