Real or virtual?

While reading a book, I came across three interesting letters: IRL. In Real Life.

What an interesting term. My mind began swirling with thoughts. Shouldn’t life be real? Does the real automatically constitute life? And is life really real, or is it virtual? You meet people, work with them, and get to know their strengths and weakness. But do you really come to know them as a person? I mean, do you really get to know them beyond the flesh and bones that you encounter on a regular basis? Sometimes, people you know suddenly do something unethical, and break your trust or cheat you. Worse, they bad mouth you. Then you find yourself saying, “I thought I knew him (her), but I really don’t!” I don’t think that was real. Maybe it was all virtual.

Let’s bring this concept further.

Isn’t it amazing that when we talk to someone who’s on the other side of the globe through a screen, we call it “Face Time” rather than “Image time”? We press a button to express our approval to be connected with people we don’t know well and call those people “Friends”. I have a “Like” page that’s running towards 100K in following because people, most of whom I’ve yet to meet in person, “liked” me. Is this on-screen world real, or is it virtual? Stay with me and process this thought.

The “screen world” may just be the real world to many of us, especially the young. We still call it virtual even when we spend most of our time there and have only a handful of friends we barely personally interact with.

I post something positive in my FB pages every day, and people follow it. One day, I offered a free talk in a venue that can only accommodate 600. When I announced this, I had 150 registrations within an hour, and I had to close it after six hours because the last count was already 600! I write a column in The Philippine Star, and people read it.

Because I also post there my once-a-month public seminar and workshop on leadership, most of my readers sign up as participants, or they send their people or children to attend. This is what connections is all about. This is the real world for me. And it still mystifies me to no end.

When you look at the different social media platforms, people really do share and even over-share their lives online. Many of these people may rarely bare their souls to live beings, yet when they go online, they do so with such intensity to the point of creating familiarity with people they’ve never even met in protein form. Many of them do meet personally eventually, but only after a degree of familiarity has been established through online communication (which, of course, carries some risks and dangers).

When you’re tweeting or when you’re blogging or when you’re posting online ideas, pictures and experiences, are you not in the real world? If you say you’re not, then are you essentially saying you’re a “fake” in your own made-up world? Is your personality online totally different from you in real life, because you can’t say what you want to say in person and so you need an avatar to do that for you? Which one now is the real world, and which one is the virtual world? This is the great blur!

People who don’t do social networking say that online isn’t the real world. They dismiss the power and the influence of the digital world in our lives. One day, they will wake up without understanding the world they’re in.

I’m not advocating the eradication of personal human-to-human interaction and relationships, and neither am I promoting online or virtual substitutes. But these are the signs of the times, and for someone to say, “I’ll never look at a Facebook page, let alone use it…” is akin to someone who said some centuries ago, “I’ll never use email…”

Denial is not a river in Egypt. We need to get out of our comfort zone, understand how this world is changing, and use it for the good. Believe me, this isn’t about to go away.

Is it real? Or is it virtual? Beats me – I’m still learning!

(Francis Kong will do his highly acclaimed whole-day seminar “Culture of Personal Excellence” on Oct. 17, 2013 at CCF Makati A-Venue Mall, Makati Avenue. For further inquiries, contact Inspire at 09158055910, or call 632-6310912 for details.)