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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