Goodbye Real World, Hello Digital Realm

People are disconnecting from their physical surroundings and going digital.

Have you ever had this experience? I have, lots of times. You're standing beside a young lady who is seemingly transfixed by something she's holding in her hand. Is it a precious gem? A fascinating book? An artefact stolen from King Tut's tomb? None of the above: it's a piece of technology, a BlackBerry or a cell phone. She's staring at it or listening to it intently. Her personal sensorium has magically merged with its digital circuits. Her body might be there, but her mind is elsewhere. She ignores the people around her, even those in danger of ramming into her in the crowded hallway. She doesn't care about the physical space she occupies. She is being elsewhere.

In his 1927 magnum opus Being and Time, the German existentialist thinker Martin Heidegger explained in ponderous language how human life was bounded by time and space, and how, to live authentically, we must recognize our spatial and temporal limits. He called human existence Dasein, which translates quite literally as “being there.” We exist in a given time and space, though we might be tempted to flee from this realization because we fear fixity and death.

Much later, in 1979, the Hal Ashby film Being There satirized Heidegger's idea of authentic presence in telling the story of a simple-minded gardener played by Peter Sellers, whose knowledge of the world is based on television. Fears of TV invading our lives like in an old Outer Limits episode have largely disappeared, having gone the way of the 8-track and Betamax. But do not adjust your television set: there are new digital monsters in town.

Are we still Dasein? Do we still live in fixed times and spaces? More and more, technology has unmoored us from the docks of our physical beings. Sure, we still have bodies. Yet those bodies spend much of their days drifting through digital clouds of emails, Facebook friends (all 500 of them), and cell phone messages. We're on the move in this brave new digital world and, more and more, we feel resentful if we have to be in any one real place.

There are now two “me's,” two “you's”: the being there of our embodied physical presence, and the being somewhere else of virtual presence. On cell phones, computers, and PDAs, we achieve something like an out-of-body experience, connecting to data or distant discussions as we ignore the physical world around us. But we don't just ignore it – we simultaneously disconnect from the local social world. This has consequences.

For one thing, private spaces bleed into public ones as diginauts – the travellers through this new digital space – simply ignore others in their physical surroundings. I count with groans and sighs the number of times I've heard cell phone conversations begin with “Wassup … not much, how about you?” or “I'm at the corner of wherever and wherever and I'll be there in five minutes.” Is her friend so paranoid that she needs regular updates or she'll phone the police on the assumption that Al Quaeda has hijacked the bus? Can't you just shut up for ten minutes and read a newspaper or book? I've actually heard people on cell phones angrily tell their interlocutors to stay on the line until they get home, presumably to make sure that they spend absolutely no time with themselves. No internal monologues for me please!

Even dodgier are those diginauts who choose to unburden the sordid details of their private lives to everyone within earshot. The strangest case of this I can remember happened in a moderately crowded Tim Horton's where a middle-aged woman spent about an hour on her phone describing the breakdown of her marriage to a friend, not to mention everyone else enjoying their coffees and donuts in the restaurant. I have to admit, I was hooked: this stranger's story was like an episode of Desperate Housewives, only with more chocolate sprinkles and reality.

Needless to say, people lost in digital space tend to pay little attention to the basic rules of politeness: lurid tales of email flaming date back to the 1990s, while the average post-millennial digitnaut will often stay plugged into their music or cell phone chats while dealing with store clerks, bank tellers, or bus drivers. The entire service industry, now comprising about 75 per cent of the North American economy, now matters less than one's cherished iPod. Bored students in university classrooms drift off to their Facebook pages and MSN messages ten minutes into a lecture, oblivious to the notion that this might actually offend the professor or affect their cognitive intakes, and thus their grades.

But it is not just rudeness and the bleeding of the private realm into the public that emerge from the triumph of digital communication. In the worst cases, the digital traveller totally unplugs from the real world, leading to dire physical consequences for himself or others. South Koreans seem particularly vulnerable in this regard. A few years ago, a young Korean man died of dehydration and malnutrition while playing video games in an Internet café. Just this month, a couple living in a Seoul suburb allowed their real child to starve to death while they spent their days in another such café, caring for a virtual offspring named Anima in an online fantasy role-playing game.

Closer to home, many of you no doubt remember the 2008 story of 15-year-old Brandon Crisp who ran away from home when his dad cut him off from his beloved video game Call of Duty 4. Brandon died when he couldn't survive the grim realities of the forests near his Barrie, Ontario home, an experience his PS3 game console hadn't prepared him for.

Most pervasively, the being elsewhere of the typical diginaut has led to an erosion of our epistemic unity: we know less, and what we do know is a mass of unsorted, fragmented data. And we don't care, since we have machines to do our thinking and sorting for us. To borrow a line from Nicholas Carr, Google has made us stupid.

Gone are internal monologues (Who am I? What do I want?), extended fantasies, a wonder at local architecture or the flock of Canada geese flying overhead. We're no longer here, but somewhere else - or to be more accurate, in many other somewhere elses. With our laptop open, our cell phone chiming, and our BlackBerry blinking, who has time for real people or real places? Who has time to be there? Who has… wait, I just got an e-mail… I'll have to finish this later…