Over the past few weeks I have been consuming quite a bit of media commentary on our increasingly online culture here in the U.S. Yesterday, All Things Considered did a story on break-ups and divorce in the digital age:
Apparently people are shocked to discover how difficult it is to sever your online connections with someone when you end your physical world relationship. I found this pretty amusing. If you have common friends in the physical world, why wouldn’t you have just as many common Facebook friends? I also found the suggested solution pretty amusing: “don’t put your personal life online.” Is this really a workable solution? Sites like Facebook are designed to be an extension of our personal lives. In fact, I would argue that there is no distinction or separation between our physical and virtual lives—what happens online affects our offline activities and our offline interests and habits largely determine what we do in online spaces.

My point that there is no separation between the physical and the virtual world is backed up by Julian Dibbbell who researched the connection between the economies of online video games and the “real world” economy. In his radio interview on Focus 580, Digital Media and Virtual Worlds, Dibbell explains that in video games such as World of Warcraft players earn game money that they can use to buy items needed in the game such as swords, potions, etc. Apparently there are people who play these games in order to gain enough points that they can buy a bunch of stuff in the game and then sell this stuff to other players for real money on sites like Ebay. In fact, in China there are whole factories in which people sit around and play these games all day to accumulate things that the owners then sell online for real money. Essentially, the “pretend” economies of these games have created real world sweat shops.

While I do think we need to take our online activities seriously precisely because they have real world effects, we also need our cultural critics to use humor to point out where the online world crosses the line into the absurd. In the video clip below Stephen Colbert uses his usual satire to critique two bizarre uses of web 2.0 technologies: a website that displays all your credit card purchases for the world to see and a site where people can tag a map with the last place they had sex.

In a similar way Jon Stewart calls to task the hyperbole of many bloggers who use violent language to describe his comedic critique of the news. While it is easy to dismiss these blogs as silly, I think that this sort of war-like language is a sign of and a catalyst for the hateful tone of our current political rhetoric. Again, online activity with real world consequences.

And to conclude, I leave you with a link to another Focus 580 interview with Robert McChesney, a communications professor at the University of Illinois. In the interview, titled  The Death and Life of American Journalism McChesney discusses the effect blogs are having on traditional print journalism such as newspapers. He also makes a good argument for why blogs are not a substitute for traditional forms of journalism.