Online and Offline
Often these days, more often than at any other point in my life as an aware adult, I find myself asking if I need to be looking at a screen. This means the phone, the laptop, even the desktop computer that I have designed to be as easy to turn on when I need it and off when–most of the time–I don’t. It’s not that I think I have a specific problem with the virtual world. If I compare myself to a lot others I know, I probably spend less time there. I have a set of responsibilies that keeps me anchored elsewhere, in things more tangible, for a lot of the day. My biggest problem at the moment is that my work requires a screen. There we operate under the presumption that pretty much anything worth knowing can be stored, displayed and worked on within the screen-based view.
But what is the problem with screens? What counts as a screen? Do I write “screen” when, really, I mean anything connected to a computer? Maybe.
Lately, I speculate that I acquired some unspoken, early-in-life faith that what I see displayed1 is a reproduction of the thing itself. This faith might account for how I could spend so many years looking at things on my monitor and not feel a dread about the unreality of it all. Sure, my eyes might get tired and strained, the rest of my body might start to fidget. But there wasn’t anything inherent to the screen itself that repelled me. How ever much I might dislike (in theory) the glowing two-dimensional representations I look at each day, I am still comfortable with them. I am trying to get less comfortable. Or it’s not a matter of will. I just am getting less comfortable and I am trying to figure out the reasons.
Maybe events are changing me. If the official discussions in the news weren’t enough, I’ve heard from so many people that some small part of the internet that they once enjoyed is now trashed for this or that reason that you might guess. The internet has coasted for a long time–long past when it was deserved–on the intuition that what one sees is default authentic, tied to the offline world in some way. For many of us that belief is flipping to unsustainable, in a way that makes us question the time we spend here. What comes next? Do we have the choice and the means to leave? And if we so, will others come with us? What will I (we) do instead?
I know that I am paying ever-more attention to how I think and gather information when I am not online. Some parts of the world are more than one generation deep into this experiment with dependence on machine intelligence. Now, right at the moment when computers are becoming unfathomably advanced, the necessity of finding a different relationship to these devices has become overwhelming.
For me, at least, it is always seeing–the digital world is almost coextensive the visible one. I wonder about those with impairments, who have to use the internet through some other primary sense besides seeing. How do they experience the modern internet? Does it seem any more or less unmoored than it does for those of us who are able to see it? ↩︎