me irl
I'm not convinced I agree with this argument but I figured I'd write it down to get it out of my head...
Most of our relationships with other people are primarily mediated through digital interactions rather than in person - that's old news. The group chat thread does more to bind your friends together than the times you all get to hang out. If you're becoupled, or dating someone, or multiple someones, you probably met on an app to facilitate all your early flirtation and awkward getting-to-know-you conversations. You have no idea how tall your coworkers are because you only ever see them on Zoom.
Blah blah blah the internet ate real life etc etc get over it.
But there was a brief period between the time it first became possible to base your life around digital-first interactions, and the time that type of interaction became the default for most everyone. Ten years, maybe. Fifteen at most. And those of us who grew up during that interregnum with unfettered internet access stood at a crossroads.
I was one of the ones who went digital-first, circa 2000 - a millennial in every sense of the word. Conversations with friends over AIM were the primary text of our friendships, and the times we got to hang out in person, the punctuation. I had two long-distance internet girlfriends before I gathered up the nerve to ask someone out in real life. When I did, I begged my first girlfriend to break up with me over AIM once I knew it was coming, rather than end things in person, because I couldn't stand to wait that long. I hung out in chat rooms and made friends in time zones all over the world so I always had someone to hang out with throughout deep insomniac nights.
I just felt safer and easier being able to gather my thoughts and type them out than risk saying the wrong thing. I could be wittier, more impressive, more knowledgable. A better version of myself.
At a certain point, however, I stepped away, back to meatspace. Sure, part of it was basic platform tribalism. I felt attached to AIM and LiveJournal while everyone else was getting cell phones and moving to Myspace and Facebook. My preferred internet hangouts slowly turned into ghost towns and I was unwilling to compromise. Another part of it was going to college, meeting new people, getting a car, and developing a lot more autonomy over who I hung out with, when, and how.
But mostly I recognized that I needed to get off the fucking internet and develop the in-person social skills I was going to need to need for the rest of my life. You know, for the real world, where adults lived.
lmao, pwned
It's not so much that you can't socialize in person anymore (though give it another two or three pandemics and we'll see). It's the expectation that digital interactions will shape those personal relationships that has me shook. When's the last time you met new people in person first, and became friends? How did your friendship change when you began texting or chatting online regularly? When you started to refer to things that happened online in irl conversation?
None of this is to mention the way internet manners and social posturing can influence or even dominate our expectations for our relationships with others.
I'm concerned that most people in my generation and older experienced this migration to a digital social life as a linear progression, indistinguishable from the forward march of technology, while those younger never saw an alternative. I'm worried it's only the early-adopters-turned-second-guessers, like myself, who are left to stand in like luddite Cassandras and say no, there was a choice there that we could have made. And I'm afraid we've made the wrong one.