Unquiet Desperation

It was seventy-seven degrees and sunny in Cleveland today, and though only a few trees are starting to turn, you can tell by the angle of the light and the scent in the air that autumn is here. It is young, true, but it’s there all the same, if you have eyes to recognize it. You know it because there will be a day like today in about a month. The light will look the same way, coming through the few clouds, but it will be fifteen to twenty degrees cooler, and the leaves will be coming into their full color.

I spent the day outdoors, helping my father-in-law clean out his woodshop, ridding it of all the old scrap wood. After unloading it all, we sat on their porch in a pair of amish adirondack chairs, sipping root beer and watching the bees working to get all the remaining goodness from my mother-in-law’s garden before it dies off.  I sat there, in the sunlight, just chatting away with him. Not about anything specific. Just resting and watching the world go by.

There is a lot of data in what happened to me today. I could sit, tell you all about it, go look up the exact weather, the barometric pressure, all the dry details. It would be factually true, and yet it would miss something. The soul of it would be gone. The thing that makes it an experience, and not just a recording, would be missing.

One of the comments I got from last week’s essay was from Matt Wilson. He said:

I grow vegetables in a small plot in my backyard for a lot of the same reasons. After work, getting my fingers dirty by doing some weeding reintroduces me to the real world.

I started to think about that phrase, The Real World.  It’s not the first time I’ve heard a person use it when separating their offline activities from their online activities.  I find it curious because so many of us spend so much time online these days. We enjoy it, revel in the information, the connectedness, the geekiness of some things, the banality of others. We swim through streams of data all day long. Email, podcasts, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube.

And yet, how many of us feel that, for all the glory that is the data, there is something missing?  That it’s all virtual, that it’s removed from The Real World, somehow?

Curious.

How does this thinking affect basic human relationships?  I know, for my part, that I have met a great many people online, yet the ones I am closest to I go out of my way to seek out in a more sensory, or Real, manner. Phone calls, meeting at cons, meeting for lunch, etc. While, intellectually, I know the reailty of all the people out there, unless I make a connection with them beyond the bits and bytes, it is hard to cultivate a friendship with them. It can be a simple as a Skype call in real-time (there’s that word, REAL, again), but that small thing gives me something to relate to that email or chat or Twitter will never provide.

So, dear reader, I am curious to hear your side of things. Do you draw the distinction between the real world and virtual space?  How does it affect your relationships, your interactions, your daily routine? If you were to shut off the computer, how many of those relationships would survive, and why?