The Great Offline — Real Life

Real Life editor Nathan Jurgenson coined the term “digital dualism” to describe the false presumption of a clean line between the online and the offline. Like the nature/culture binary, the online/offline distinction stems from a misguided preoccupation with authenticity. It frames our relationship with technology in terms of either connection of disconnection, wrongly implying that the “connected” are alienated from their true selves.

As concepts, “wilderness” and “the offline” are deeply enmeshed. Both offer mythologies of ahistoricity and unaccountability, an escape clause from the dilemmas of a globalized world. They cloak themselves in the language of embodiment (the wind in your hair, the sand under your feet), while offering up the fantasy of moving through the world without a digital or ecological footprint, as a little wisp of pure soul. Together — in setting up a binaristic opposition between the corrupted, connected, digital self on the one hand, and the pure, wild, disconnected self on the other — they pose major obstacles to thinking through the complexity of human-technological-ecological relations.

The “offline world” and the “wilderness” function as vessels for our frustrations with contemporary life: They are defined by what they don’t contain, rather than what they do

The construction of screen time as the moral evil responsible for this fall figures screen time and offline time as two sharply distinct and yet internally homogeneous categories, bound in direct opposition to one another (screen time is passive and introverted; offline time is active and social). The absence of analysis about what exactly we are doing online or offline — as well as the ways that screens and “real life” blur together — lend this discussion an almost magical quality: It is as if the mere presence of a screen becomes a kind of radiation, triggering irreparable mutations that lessen our humanity.

In shifting the emphasis from what one is doing with the screen to how often one looks at it, we also shift the emphasis away from the worlds we are building collectively, and towards how we are inhabiting them individually.

The concepts of the “offline world” and the “wilderness” function as vessels into which we pour our frustrations with contemporary life: They are defined by what they don’t contain, rather than what they do. It is entirely possible to abandon the fantasy of “the offline” as the seat of the real, while remaining critical about the ways contemporary technologies — and the socioeconomic systems within which they are embedded — are shaping our relations and identities. In fact, abandoning the idea of the online-offline binary is the only way to meaningfully engage with the question of how we can build a world that is fairer, more conducive to more happiness for more people.