A month doesn’t pass where you won’t find an article on some website, in some newspaper or magazine, or hear a story on TV about how people are “losing themselves” to some online service, game, technology — you name it. Or the story will go something like this, “Can you believe that when I was talking to my friend the other day at lunch, she whipped out her phone and started texting?!”
There’s this dichotomy or division between how we divide our life with time spent online and time spent interacting with others face-to-face (or in real life — IRL). Or is there?
Nathan Jurgenson, writing over at The New Inquiry suggests that this dichotomy is a false one, and researchers and academics who are hand-wringing about the lack of quality face-time with one another are simply missing the point.
It’s not one or the other, he argues, it’s both because they are both an integral part of our lives now.
How sound is this argument?