{"id":1227,"date":"2021-02-19T16:34:40","date_gmt":"2021-02-19T05:34:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/?p=1227"},"modified":"2021-02-17T11:33:30","modified_gmt":"2021-02-17T00:33:30","slug":"the-reality-of-in-real-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/the-reality-of-in-real-life","title":{"rendered":"The reality of “in real life”"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the COVID dance of lockdown laws and ever-changing restrictions continues, online interactions<\/a> have become the norm. If I\u2019m not facilitating an online workshop, I\u2019m group chatting with friends or attending my millionth Zoom get-together. In a recent meeting, a fellow writer said she couldn\u2019t wait to meet me \u201cin real life\u201d. \u201cBut,\u201d I said after unmuting myself, \u201cisn\u2019t this real life?\u201d<\/p>\n

With the dramatic changes our work and social lives have taken this year, it may feel like we\u2019ve hit pause on \u201creal life\u201d. On social media I\u2019ve read many laments of wanting to \u201cdelete 2020\u201d and comments like, \u201cWhen will we get back to reality?\u201d This makes me consider if our world is \u201con hold\u201d or if this pandemic space we now inhabit is more liminal and less simplistic than we think? However, this isn\u2019t just a gap in time. Time is still running and unfortunately 2020 can\u2019t be cancelled.<\/p>\n

The term \u201cin real life\u201d or IRL emerged in the early days of the internet to distinguish between offline and online, positioning offline as the \u201cmost real\u201d. However, as the internet has progressed in gigabyte leaps and bounds and our lives have continued to embrace the digital, it seems misguided to dismiss our online interactions as \u201cunreal\u201d.<\/p>\n

If the online meeting I had yesterday isn\u2019t \u201creal\u201d, does that cheekily mean my deadline is also not real? Are the distanced classes my partner is taking no longer important or assessable because they\u2019re off-campus? Or do we need to reconsider the weight and authenticity of our online interactions and reframe what we consider \u201creal\u201d?<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember in late 2016 I went to the US and met up with a friend I made online,\u201d says writer, editor and digital media artist Rory Green. \u201cI remember being surprised how natural it felt after we hugged, like we had always hung out face-to-face even though we rarely video called one another.\u201d<\/p>\n

I have many online friendships I cherish just as much as in-person hangouts with my pub trivia teammates. And my relationship with my long-term long-distance partner is dominated by instant messages, emojis, selfies and phone chats, all of which are extremely loving, sincere and real.<\/p>\n

\u201cRemoving \u2018IRL\u2019 from the \u2018online versus IRL\u2019 debate has made me really reconsider how I use tech and online spaces \u2014, not just as a way of meeting new people, but as a way of maintaining existing relationships too,\u201d says digital storyteller Tegan Webb. \u201cAll intimacies feel different, for sure, but not inferior. Just different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Admittedly, talking to my partner on the phone is always different to speaking with them in-person and there\u2019s a magical feeling attached to being in the same room as them, especially after being apart for so long. However, when we\u2019re online we\u2019re also not really \u201capart\u201d because neither interaction is lesser than the other, just different.<\/p>\n

Online intimacy<\/h1>\n

When contemplating her online communications, Tegan says, \u201cIt’s funny the things that have really stuck with me \u2014 friends leaving voice messages instead of texts, seeing people’s bedrooms in the backgrounds of video calls, having unexpectedly long chats while playing online games.\u201d<\/p>\n

As our new digital day-to-day continues to unfold, our intimacies and the ways we relate to one another have shifted. I love noticing people\u2019s pets in the background of their Zoom calls or seeing Instagram live stories of them cooking dinner at home, just like me.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt feels silly to separate people into URL\/IRL friendships because the spaces bleed into one another,\u201d says Rory. \u201cI’d guess that many more people are conscious of this bleed now that so much COVID-19 communication and socialising is done online.\u201d<\/p>\n

This \u201cbleed\u201d is one I recently witnessed when attending the Emerging Writers\u2019 Festival closing-night event. I turned on my fairy lights and danced to DJ Papiwhatsgood alongside fellow writers and artists, their friends and partners, and of course their pets. I was able to attend this entire festival without leaving my house, giving me the comfort of knowing I didn\u2019t need to risk my health to have fun.<\/p>\n

The biggest surprise was feeling like I was in the exact same room with other people dancing and loving life even though we were all in our separate isolation bubbles. Like many things that are considered merely black and white, the binary of \u201creal life\u201d versus \u201conline\u201d is full of grey areas and far more fluid than we think.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think people who don’t accept the premise that online interactions are \u2018real\u2019 often do so to avoid accountability,\u201d explains Rory, referencing the online bullying and trolling that can occur in semi-public internet spaces. \u201cTo me it seems like a way of downgrading the significance of these events to suggest things are either not that \u2018important\u2019 or conversely not that \u2018bad\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

The value we place on certain experiences and interactions has an impact on how we perceive them. To dismiss online as less \u201creal\u201d than offline downgrades the negative impacts of online bullying and the significant impacts internet communities have on movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Such socio-political online movements have successfully mobilised using social media and other internet platforms. To dismiss online as less \u201creal\u201d also deprives us of the many ways we can communicate and form community, especially during these times.<\/p>\n

The unexpected intimacy of online spaces is revealing new and hopeful ways for us to interact with each other and find our communities. \u201cTo me, being \u2018real\u2019 is about being authentic,\u201d says Kieran Bicheno, digital editor of Standard Media. \u201cHaving the choice of text, audio, visual or physical communication gives people far greater ability to be \u2018real\u2019 to themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Attending my weekly yoga classes isn\u2019t the same now we\u2019re not on premises, but my bedroom floor and my yoga mat create a great makeshift studio and seeing my fellow classmates\u2019 videos as they practise beside me feels both peaceful and personal. These classes aren\u2019t any less enjoyable or any less \u201creal\u201d than my regular in-studio classes. They\u2019re just different. And I\u2019m okay with that.<\/p>\n

Rae White is a non-binary writer and poet. Their poetry collection Milk Teeth (UQP) won the 2017 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. Their short story The Body Remembers won second prize in the 2019 Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction. Rae is the editor of #EnbyLife Journal for non-binary creatives.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The binary of \u201creal life\u201d versus \u201conline\u201d is full of grey areas and far more fluid than we think. Do we need to reconsider the weight and authenticity of our online interactions and reframe what we consider \u201creal\u201d? We take a look.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":1228,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,96,97,73],"tags":[311,314,129,312,313],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1227"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1229,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227\/revisions\/1229"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}