Web 2.0 Digitage by ocean.flynn on flickr
What’s your real life?
I was recently speaking with my grade 6 students about online versus “real life” bullying and had difficulty picking the “right” words to talk about the issue. I shared with students that my online life feels is real to me. When I have a conversation with family using Skype, write a blog post about my travels, share my experiences on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc., it’s a real experience, and I’m living my real life.
Two weekends ago, I was in Tokyo for a Google summit. During his keynote, Jim Sill said that we used to be living in a material world and we’re now living in a youtube, Instagram, etc. world. We could say that we’re living in an information world; it’s not such a stretch to say that we live largely in a digital world. One of my students suggested that a person who is cyberbullied can simply close all his/her online accounts. This lead to a good classroom discussion about whether or not a person can live completely removed from the digital world, and whether participation in the digital world is a “right”. I shared that I would feel very isolated here in Japan if I couldn’t use social media and other technology tools to keep in frequent contact with family and friends all over the world.
I read an article browsing through Pulse this morning that talked about how Facebook has healing power and can help people restore their self-esteem. On the flip side, there are people whose lives are adversely affected by online attacks. The opposite of real is imaginary, and while I can take on imaginary personas online, I often use the digital world as an extension of my physical world. If we remove the distance between the digital world and the real world and acknowledge the relationship that exists between them, we realize that kindness, caring, responsibility, love and all those other attributes of a meaningful life matter whether we are online or in the physical world.