Another Argument Against Modernity’s Dualisms

The debate about online and offline is an understandably great source of contention in a time where the lasting effects of our digital connectedness can be nothing more than speculation. It may take beyond our lifetime to know how our rapidly developing relationship with technology will truly impact humanity. Nathan Jurgenson’s perspectives on our online/offline obsession, however, personally aided me in developing a more comprehensive opinion on the subject.

Essentially, there are two camps discussing online versus offline life. One of them is cautionary, afraid of what our constant connectedness to digital devices will do to our ability to live as “real” humans. Sherry Turkle conducted extensive investigation into this perspective, illustrated in her book Alone Together. The thought is that our online lives are ruining our ability to create meaningful relationships and experiences in our offline ones. On the other side of this debate are people like Nathan Jurgenson, proclaiming that online and offline are useless distinctions, that we now live in such a way that our offline life is informed by our online one, and vis versa, so that we are never either offline or online. He says that we “fetishize” the offline, so that people obsessively place unnecessary value on an idea that is still abundant. He bitingly quips that “maintaining the fiction of the collective loss of the offline for everyone else is merely an attempt to construct their own personal time-outs as more special,” in a sense paralleling these offline-fanatics to pretentious hipsters pretending they are in “some special, elite group with access to the pure offline, turning the real into a fetish and regarding everyone else as a little less real and a little less human.”

In a manner apart from his snarky commentary, Jurgenson offers us the term “digital dualism” to explain this line of thought that says online and offline are separate entities, and I think this perfectly encapsulates the entire nature of this entire debate. Our society is obsessed with dualisms. We want everything to be neatly categorized into this or that, with nothing in between. We see this in gender, in sexuality — I mean, there’s currently a quote going around the internet at the moment talking about how “our society is so structured on binaries that people think cats are the opposite of dogs.”

McLuhan would chalk this attitude up to a mode of thinking developed in the print era — the era of categorization, linear thought, and structure. And if we look at this debate through that lens, an entirely new understanding of this idea can be made available. People decrying online in favor of offline are people still operating in a print-era mindset; they see it in dualistic categories. People who see online/offline as relatively meaningless descriptors are people operating with a electronic-era mindset. They are able to see things as more fluid, circular, constantly-changing and non-permanent. These are two entirely separate mental frameworks, which means that no matter what issue they discuss, these frameworks are going to influence decidedly different conclusions.

When we consider this debate through that perspective, then, it becomes easier to see that this truly does just come down to the tensions between modern and post-modern thought processes. Of course this restructuring of human life is going to alarm those who are rooted in modern constructions of the world. Online and offline lives are clearly separate. But what post-modern mentalities provide for is the understanding of fluidity between those dualisms. Yes, each exist in different realms, but it is not so simple. There are complexities and overflow between the two — each informs the other. They are not rigid. Such an understanding still allows for criticisms and serious analysis of the interaction between the two; in fact, it allows for even better ones. By not imposing two fixed categories onto the situation, there remains the opportunity to further investigate the gray matter in between — it is not erased within the dualistic structure. That is exactly why I am decidedly within the post-modern camp on this one; a better understanding of how our lives are affected by digital technology can only come if we remove the framework that prevent us from seeing all the complexities of the issue.