When the self-isolation measures of the pandemic first began, digital technology, and especially video conferencing, felt like a lifesaver. There was a flurry of activity and experimentation as everyone attempted to recreate their old lives, their old hobbies, their old businesses, and their old relationships, online. And it was fun at first! There was a convenience and novelty to video events. You didn’t have to prepare to get there until literally 1 minute beforehand, and you didn’t need to shower, or look too good, or even wear pants. But slowly, I have started to notice some subtle but insidious side effects…
I would spend hours playing games or “hanging out” with friends in these virtual environments, but then the next morning, I would look back and I couldn’t remember anything about the night! It was all just this blur of frozen faces in small rectangles smudged with digital artefacts. It was as if nothing had actually occurred at all! Which I guess is kind of accurate. Objectively, all I did was stare at a screen all night (to say nothing of the day). At the time, it felt to me like I was having a real and meaningful interaction, like I really was with my friends. But in truth, it was all an illusion. I was alone.
When you couple these digital phantasms with all the TV and movies I’ve been watching, not to mention all the surreal, anxious dreams I’ve been having (which I also can’t really remember), it all starts to blur together and make me question reality. I’m having trouble figuring out what is real, what is imagined, what is digital, what is physical, what is a dream, and what is a movie. My days and nights are all the same, it’s me lost in a screen or lost in a dream. It feels like Plato’s cave, where the shadows on the wall are mistaken for reality.
I’m also reminded of the concept of the Uncanny Valley, which is the space where digital animation looks good enough to almost pass as real, but not real enough to look right. It leads to this creepy, cold, inhuman quality where everything is just subtly off somehow, as if you were hallucinating or in some kind of twisted funhouse or simulation. The same is true when I look back on a Zoom call. It feels like I must have been inebriated because everything is mushy and vague and mixed up. And I can only imagine what will happen if we continue to live in this liminal space for much longer!
I have some ideas for solutions, which these two memes demonstrate well:
