“
Author after author pretends to be a lone voice, taking a courageous stand in support of the offline in precisely the moment it has proliferated and become over-valorized. For many, 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, as allowing them to rise above those social forces of distraction that have ensnared the masses. “I am real. I am the thoughtful human. You are the automaton.
Nathan Jurgenson, The IRL Fetish
Dead on.
It’s been bugging me lately how one of the main public roles for a ‘social media’ writer/commentator of my age seems to be the kind of wan, melancholy, supercilious hand-wringing Jurgenson skewers here. Balls to that.
What Jurgenson doesn’t talk about is how this constant discussion about the ‘death’ of offline completely neglects the still very significant minority of people who are permanently in this “blessed” state of disconnection, generally because they’re poor or old or both. Somehow I doubt they’re the lucky ones.
