The Virtual Vacuum

I remember one night, a few months a go. It was about 10 pm and I was at home. I had not written an article I was supposed to publish that day, so I was working on it on my laptop. I don’t usually work that late but this was an exception. As my eyes left the monitor and looked across the room, I saw it in all its glory. It was the virtual vacuum.

What I saw was not that spectacular, nor uncommon, but it somehow resonated deeply. It was Diana, sitting on the sofa, reading something on her laptop. Although we were in the same room, just feet away, we weren’t really there. Our minds were caught in the virtual vacuum.

That is true loneliness to me.

Being surrounded by people, but oblivious of them. Having millions of people around us but no friends. Technology has helped us to reach more people and explode our social graph and so forth. What we got, however, is not what we expected.

The Internet helped us broaden the pool of people that we interact with, but it rarely helped deepen connections we already had. Au contraire. The virtual vacuum sucked us in so hard that some of us lost focus of cultivating offline relationships. And now we’re left with no true friends in the real world, but with dozens of pseudo virtual friends.

Mind you, it’s not technology’s fault. It our fault. It’s what we let it do to us. The Internet is not bad, nor good. It’s the way some of us use it that’s at fault.

One of the symptoms of this virus is the fact that few people speak their minds face-to-face. The Internet has taught us to create personas, MySpace profiles, blogs that show us the way we want to be. And we’re comfortable speaking our minds from behind those personas. However the persona thing si playing tricks on us. We don’t do the work we need to in order to really BECOME the people we want to be. That’s why I’ve met dozens of people that would not walk up to someone they want to meet. But they would add that person to their Friends on Facebook. Someone might swear at you on their blog, but tell you face-to-face that it was only a joke.

It seems ironic then, that we’re living in the midst of the greatest era for self-help books. People are more interested that ever in doing and achieving. And it’s true. They are interested. They buy the books. Some of them even read them. Few take the steps required to actually achieve. And even fewer focus on BECOMING. And it’s this becoming that’s the most important thing and the hardest.

The Internet has helped us get what we want NOW in some areas. But if we can have it ALL NOW in these areas, why couldn’t we have everything NOW, period? Like the character we wish we had, the friends we wish we had, the fame we wish we had, the money we wish we had, the self-respect we wish we had. Some of us, clearly, think we can have it all NOW, while most of us think we should.

It’s this very paradigm that’s leading us into the virtual vacuum more and more and that’s making our social lives more and more barren. And the worst part is that it has the snowball effect: seeking for shortcuts in the virtual vacuum makes us more and more inept in the real world, which makes us seek even more shortcuts in the virtual vacuum.