Our Second Existence
Your heart sinks into your chest and you become filled with regret. You knew you shouldn’t have said anything, yet you decided to say it anyway. Those around you give you looks of disapproval and tend to look away. You feel embarrassed and disappointed. You decide to take back what you said — and click “delete.” The words you wrote online, though not spoken by you verbally, was understood by others to be spoken in the verbal sense.
The separation between the screen and your physical life is a blurred line. The two worlds of the physical and digital are intrinsically unique from each other and separate; yet simultaneously linked and inseparable. Why is this? Why do the words we write online become so interlinked to who we are? When did that happen? And why does the absence of “likes” and “comments” hurt our self-esteem so much?
In the example above, an imaginary post about some topic fails to receive any likes and comments. This is the equivalent to those around you not responding to what you said, ignoring you, or not laughing at your joke. It’s demeaning, yet also innocent. “Maybe they didn’t see my post?” you think to yourself. Or maybe they did and ignored it. Your digital identity has been attacked.
So why does the silence of others hurt so badly? If the digital world is all 1s and 0s, we as humans should not be emotionally hurt by some pixels on a screen lighting up or not. However, according to Luciano Floridi in his 2010 paper Ethics After the Information Revolution (pg. 10), he states that “the criterion for existence is no longer being immutable or being potentially a subject to perception but being interactable.” If interaction is how we perceive existence in the 21st century, this poses a new highly personal ethical question; a question on the same league as deciding who you want to be: to what extent do I participate in the virtual world?
The digital world is all around us, and since we interact with it, it is our second plane of existence. With the growing majority of people on the internet, the more people now have both digital and physical selves. That means for the majority of the world, existence is much larger than what is just physical, which means we now have two identities we must form.
