If you needed to date the point at which “cyberspace” ceased to exist and the internet simply became a part of our corporeal existence, you could do worse than pick the first, unrecorded moment when someone said ‘lol’ instead of actually laughing out loud.

We might well think there’s something affected and just plain fake about swapping text speak for such a visceral, bodily reaction. Still, internet abbreviations wouldn’t jump the fence into spoken conversation if they didn’t have some utility – IMHO, anyway – so it’s worth taking them seriously. And like any other part of our language, they can be simultaneously useful and deeply confused.

Consider ‘IRL,’ or ‘in real life.’ We’ve long used that expression for actors – “He always plays baddies, but in real life he’s a sweetheart” – which makes sense, insofar as actors portray characters in fictional worlds wholly discontinuous from ours. As Bernard Williams once put it [1], you may be sitting a few yards from Laurence Olivier, but you are no specifiable distance from King Lear. And while an actor may ‘bring something of themselves’ to a role, the character is nonetheless ontologically distinct.

But when we use ‘in real life’ in contrast with online communication, we buy into an ontology that no longer holds up, if indeed it ever really did; one that opposes a fundamentally unreal ‘cyberspace’ to a fleshy, all-too-real ‘meatspace.’ And when we do so, we’re implicitly begging off responsibility for our online selves and effacing the ethical reality of those that we engage with.  The idea that online communication is ‘less real’ is a way of failing to fully inhabit what we say and do – much like saying ‘lol’ instead of laughing.

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Electronic communication is now in its third century, reckoning from Francis Ronalds’ telegraph of 1816 (two decades before Morse). Each new advance, from the telegraph to radio to television and now the internet, has been greeted with suspicion and anxiety as much as with enthusiasm. Each offered new forms of extended presence in the lives of others, but in ways that were always – understandably – taken to fall short of ‘real’ presence.

"I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you” says Kuno, E.M. Forster’s protagonist in his uncomfortably prescient science fiction story ‘The Machine Stops’ [2]. The gap of mediation, at least while the technology is new and unfamiliar, makes us view telepresence as less real, and so less significant. Yet nobody today thinks phone conversations are unreal, or that they take place in a virtual ‘phone-space.’ They’re simply part of how we move through our shared lifeworld, to borrow Husserl’s useful phrase.

Such worries recur with each new form of communication. The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus argued that telepresence is always limited for lacking the vulnerability that comes from physical co-location [3]. This both implies that only physical vulnerability is ‘real’ vulnerability – which any victim of online bullying or aggressive trolling can tell you is disastrously false – but also assumes the internet is wholly disconnected from our corporeality.

That, increasingly, simply isn’t true, from the harms of online body-shaming to tracking our location and physical condition via social media check-ins and ‘wearables.’ Our bodies are presented, tracked, and all too often critiqued electronically, while we walk around with the internet in our pockets or on our wrists.

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