Social Media: Online vs Offline

The online digital world is not a separate entity from the offline, physical world. It is indeed part of it.

In an online digital engagement, we can sometimes sense that a person is more fully and vibrantly present than in a rushed offline, face-to-face conversation.

Some people claim that digital environments are full of deception and less authentic than offline spaces — that digital spaces create deceit, falsity, and danger. Indeed, deception is a possible outcome of digital tech use, given that face-to-face credibility is weakened.

Online connectivity has the ability to expand, strengthen, and add new dimensions to face-to-face relationships and communities. One’s lived reality with technology is often seen as a blending, mixing the online and offline, rather than as one or the other; we do not tend to divide our lives into online and offline or perceive things as digital or face-to-face.

Social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson calls this separation digital dualism.

It is both an artificial and unnecessary separation of realism that are actually entangled. “It is because social media augments our offline lives. Offline activity fuels online content and expression; many individuals now spend significant time and energy considering how they may document online what may be happening in their lives offline (Jurgenson, 2012).

Those who have grown up immersed in the internet and digital media use may see the online and offline as melding seamlessly.

Youth may be ushering in an era in which distinctions between the online and offline, and the real and the unreal, are becoming deeply blurred, if not obliterated.

Even when spending time offline, perhaps enjoying a quiet, tech-free day in a natural setting, people can be influenced by their use of the internet and digital media. They may decide that they will document the experience with a photo (or several) that they plan to share later, mentally construct a status update they will later post on social media about the offline experience, or perhaps send a quick text message. Jurgenson calls this viewing the world with a “Facebook Eye” — thinking about how lived experience might translate to a future post, tweet, or update.

Since there is no real line dividing online and offline, and since those spheres are best thought of as enmeshed, think of the self created, performed, and exhibited online as a manifestation of the self that exists offline.

In most healthy people, that self is fluid but unitary; there is one self with many aspects, many moods, many colors — not separate and distinct multiple selves (see James, 1890/1983, on the continuity of the self).

Social media that allows for life sharing possibilities will enable the user to “live” an online life, parallel to the real, physical one. This “second life,” allows us to consider an identity that may be too daunting to explore in real life; the virtual life can be lived without inhibitions, providing the chance to mimic reality. As Turkle notes, a social media persona may be regarded as an avatar, or an internet version of the self, which may be used to create performances of oneself (Turkle, 2011).

Erving Goffman also points out the idea of a ‘theatrical self’ He says that we have a:

“front stage” where we perform, and a “backstage” where we prepare for our public appearance, where we are less self-conscious and may disclose our “real” selves.

Western philosophical traditions have always regarded the backstage self as the true or “actual”self.

In your experience, how are digital environments evolving and influencing offline connectedness?

This blog is a project for Study Unit DGA3008, University of Malta.

References

• Turkle, S. (2011) Alone Together. New York : Basic Book
• Jurgenson, N. (2019). The Social Photo: on photography and social media. London: Verso