by Jordan Cropper

Created on: March 16, 2010

Contrary to what people may say or what at first seems obvious, reality is not an objective quantity that can be measured. It is an abstract idea that is the property of each person, and of society as a whole. Our views of reality have constantly changed, but nothing has brought so sudden or great a change to our perceptions of reality as the computer.

I should explain what I mean this thought of reality as an abstract notion. It does not mean to say that certain things that are undeniably real, components of the real universe at large, can somehow fade into unreality. Rather, what has changed is our social and personal view of what constitutes things that are truly real, specifically digital media and other parts of our society that have been altered by the computer and the internet.

One case in point is the issue of relationships. Before access to the internet became as widespread as it is today, making relationships and maintaining them was difficult, especially over wider distances. However, with the dawn of the internet age, it is now possible to easily maintain relationships with people who are quite literally on the other side of the world, and it can be done with much less difficulty than was previously possible. People now use social networking sites to make and maintain relationships, the use of internet phone services such as Skype allows cheaper long distance phone calls, and sending an email is much quicker and easier than sending a letter. Yet we must begin to doubt the actual reality of these relationships. Is it true that an email on a screen is as real as a letter in your hands? The bits and bytes that make up the email are real, the pixels on the screen undoubtedly physical objects, but there is still something missing, something a letter has that an email can never have. It is the same with phone calls and texts; All is well and good, but you miss out on things that are not transferred over the phone cable. I am sure that if you asked someone only a few decades ago what they thought of people being able to meet without ever seeing more than a picture, become friends without ever exchanging a spoken word, and even fall in love without meeting face to face, it is quite possible that they would label this unreal.

We see this again with the example of piracy and the unlawful sharing of copyrighted material on the internet. Many of those who download such content would never dream of taking a CD out of a shop, but they will happily download a great deal of this content without ever drawing a parallel. Is it that the very nature of digital material, the ease with which it can be created, replicated and destroyed, has contributed in some way to the changing of what we now perceive to be reality? I believe so.

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