The False Dichotomy of Virtual/Real Worlds

In Wilson and Peterson's "The Anthropology of Online Communities" (2002), a particular point of interest was the consideration that the virtual world is not separate from the real world, but that the internet, while being new and transformative, does not imply a radical change in society, but is itself embedded in contemporary anthropological studies of society and culture. The radical social change envisioned by science fiction and internet pioneers has not come to pass. I think with the evolution of social media and politics, we really do see that the internet is not so much separate from daily lives as it has come to complement it. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, form a dialogue between our real-world social and political lives. Content (say, Gangnam Style) that is uploaded to the internet becomes viral by means of online and real-world social sharing and ultimately influences the way we act and think (and dance) in the real-world. Especially with the just passed election, I think we can really see the evolution of politics into the digital scene. Complementing the updates on TV, I looked to online media for interactive real-time updates of the vote. Even the commentary on TV has been complemented by technology changes. CNN had these fancy interactive touch screens for considering possible voting scenarios. Campaign ads are aplenty on Youtube, and so were live free streaming and discussion of the debates.

Last semester, I took the class, 'Internet, Politics, and Society' an anthropology class on how the internet has affected politics and society. In particular to the Arab Spring, the use of the internet can be interpreted from its use by revolutionaries and by its control by the state. The use of internet social platforms such as Twitter for organizing protests during the Arab Spring and publicizing the atrocities of governments can be seen as society using the internet as a tool for social and political progress. Both Iran and Eritrea were used as examples of diaspora communities using the internet to communicate and discuss their common cultural and political interests. At the same time, for example, Egypt shut down the internet to curb exactly those internet activities, and other states such as China have also used their state control of the internet to censor or completely shut down operation, with varying success. At the risk of oversimplification, these examples provide two basic points I want to make. The first is that, like Wilson and Person say, the internet while transformative is embedded in the social, cultural, and political struggles that occur in the real world. The second is that the internet is commonly forgotten to exist within real world hardware and infrastructure, that can, for example, be controlled by states, or cut in the form of transatlantic fiber optic cables, or fried at any time from a freak solar flare. The internet is not a separate entity from the real-world, but is embedded in it, both socially/culturally/politically and physically.