As Real As It Gets

This article of mine appeared in the 'Augmented Reality' issue of the 'Digital Natives with a Cause?' newsletter on Page 13. Here is the link:  http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/dn-newsletter-may-2012.pdf
I am posting the unedited version here - I think my original draft had fewer grammatical mistakes! I hope you enjoy reading this and I look forward to hearing what you have to say...

When I was in standard XI, I broke my leg and was confined to the bedroom for more than three months owing to my inability to walk. It was at that time of severe boredom and extreme loneliness that I stumbled upon the wonderful online world. I have never labelled myself as a ‘tech-savvy’ person. My visits to different sites that the Internet allowed me to access had, earlier, been limited to checking my e-mails periodically and using MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger to chat with my school friends or family members. After my fracture, I discovered that there is a limit to things one can watch on television and there is only a certain amount of books one can possess and finish reading at one point of time. My friends were busy with school-work, tuitions and suddenly I was no more a part of their world. I could only spend time with people if they chose to come home and meet me. At first, I had a lot of visitors but gradually, their frequencies and numbers started dwindling. Desperately looking for ways to spend time and maintain some contact with civilazation, I launched Google’s search engine and stumbled upon the world of online discussion-forums and groups where people from all across the world meet to talk on subjects pertaining to their common interest. From that day onwards, it seemed that my Fairy Godmother had waved her magical wand and suddenly time had started flying for me! I could while away time chatting with new people – it gave me an opportunity to know more about the view-points of people from different age-groups, different locations and different life-styles. I have always been fond of writing and it was an online friend, who, one day, introduced me to the world of blogging. Blogging not only gave me a platform to share my thoughts with others but it also gave me a chance to see what others had to say about them. Soon, I became a regular visitor of this online virtual world and some of the people I met, there, I ended up meeting in real-life as well.

I am not sure that I can call the world of the Internet a ‘virtual’ world. I am a real person and even when I am online, I would like to be considered as someone with a real existence. As I write this, I am reminded of Jacques Derrida and his statements on multiple realities. Derrida had questioned the very notion of what is reality – according to him, the very history of Western thought was based on opposition: good v/s evil, man v/s woman, mind v/s matter, black v/s white. Moreover, these oppositions were hierarchical with the second term being a corruption of the first. But how appropriate are these oppositions?  The opposite of good, in my opinion, is ‘not good’ – if we cannot define a person as being ‘good’, it is not necessary that the person can be labelled as ‘evil’. The opposite of evil is, therefore,  ‘not evil’ – a person may not be evil but he need not be good either! In the same manner, I feel it is wrong to juxtapose the real world against the virtual world.

For argument’s sake, I am going to use the terms ‘real world’ and ‘virtual world’ to explore the various facets of these two different realities. The so-called virtual world, today, is a society of its own harbouring a wide web of social interactions and relationships. Just like we are surrounded by all kinds of people in the real world, there are people of various backgrounds inhabiting the virtual world as well. In the real world, we meet people, exchange ideas, spend time together, talk about the incidents of our daily life…We do that in the virtual world as well! With lack of playgrounds in the urban centres of our country, children and adolescents restrict themselves to playing indoor games and today, online gaming is a popular phenomena with more and more people having access to gaming consoles like XBOX 360, Playstation 3 and Wii. In the real world, we all try garnering contacts to get work done, look out for jobs or get any kind of help; the virtual world is no different with people making use of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and many more to gather more human capital in the name of friends, followers and business contacts. People exercise their Right to Freedom of Speech and Expression in the real world by saying what they feel like in front of people. They do the same online on different platforms and are able to reach out to a wider mass of audience. Just like there are certain norms and values in the real world which the people are expected to follow, the people who are accessing the virtual world are also expected to adhere to a certain code of conduct. As time passes, the needs of the people change and if a society is not able to meet the changing requirements of the people, it crumbles and falls and is replaced by another. We see a similar trend happening in the virtual world as well.
At this point I would like to pose the question: Exactly how different is the real world from the virtual world?

I am a person with various identities – I am a woman; I am a counsellor; I am a resident of Mumbai – there are so many things that define me. I have many relationships; to name a few - I am a loving sister, a faithful friend and a dutiful daughter. We all have stories to share about how we met a particular person. We meet people at book-stores, in classrooms, at work…Similarly, we meet people online. Why is it that only the section of people who we met online get labelled as ‘virtual friends’? Isn’t our friendship with them as real to us as our other relationships. Do all ‘online friends’ have no significance at all in our daily, everyday life? Haven’t we at some point of the day or the other - say, on our way to work - thought about a particular friend and what he is upto even if he is someone we know in the virtual space. I, personally, would not like to have a non-real existence in the life of another person. I do not like being thought of as a virtual entity. I am no ghost who just lurks around in the online spaces from time to time! Why, then, would I deny somebody else a real place in my life?

So, is there really a distinction between the virtual world and the real one? Well, not for me, at least!