If You Aren't On the Internet, You Don't Exist

I think I've actually believed this to some extent for a while, but I didn't realize it until yesterday. Some combination of reading Hugh MacLeod and some other stuff I've already forgotten prompted the thought, anyway. But yeah. The Internet is the new order, has been the new order. Life existing offline is only a mirage and has been growing more and more irrelevant since the onset of Web 2.0.

This map also illustrates it very well. And like the tooltip says, "I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the Internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'" Think about it. Every new kid you meet, what do you do as soon as you're not face-to-face with them anymore? You facebook them. How long did it take for Google to become a verb? A few years, at least. Facebook? Considerably less. I predict verbing Internet giants will continue to become more and more frequent. And if you can't find this person on Facebook? You bug them until they've joined. And if you can't convince them to? Well, then they probably don't really exist anymore.

Offline, people are invisible except to those in their immediate vicinity. Very limited in some cases. Online, people can present themselves to the entire world and the more people who know them, the more "real" they become. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, then it doesn't make a sound. Likewise, a person doesn't exist unless others are there to observe them, to communicate with them, to know them, to validate their existance.

It's that sort of social map that Mark Zuckerberg is trying to utilize. Connections fire off left and right and a maximum of six connections supposedly separate you from any other person on the planet. Well, except for those who aren't online, who aren't on Facebook. Those people just don't exist, now do they? The people in an isolated village in Africa will not be included in this vast map. Maybe they don't even know the rest of the world exists. We certainly don't know that they do.

That is not to say that connections don't exist offline. They do, but again, they have become increasingly unimportant. Business relations stretch across continents and face-to-face meetings are a commodity. It's much more convenient to email them or instant message them. More efficient too, in some cases, because speaking on the phone makes it difficult to concentrate on anything else, but writing an email or IM frees you to work on other things or to communicate with a myriad of other people in the interim. And why do you think some people's whole lives revolve around their BlackBerry?

Ideas also flow much more freely and faster online. Blogging gave people jobs that they could have never attained by previously conventional methods because blogging opened up their ideas to many, many more networks than could be obtained offline. Offline, they did not exist. Online, they could communicate their thoughts with potentially hundreds of thousands of readers who would continue to pass them on and on and on like a virus. They would suddenly exist to so many more people.

So in this age, if you aren't connected, who are you really? Maybe you would exist to family and a handful of friends, but that's very limited. Maybe others will know of you through those immediate connections, but without actually seeing you face-to-face, they will not know you and cannot validate your existence (how many people think of their friend's friend's friend as a real, distinguishable person?). Online, with social networks and profiles catering to all audiences, a friend's friend's friend can readily contact you and engage in conversation, communication, thereby validating your existence.

Are these connections less personal? No, I don't think so. People become close by sharing ideas and thoughts, which are well facilitated online. They also become close by sharing experiences, also well facilitated online. These days, with all sorts of sophisticated video chatting and massive multiplayer online games such as WoW and Second Life, many experiences previously exclusive to face-to-face interaction can be simulated online. Are these experiences any less genuine? Why should they be? You're still interacting with real people.

But it isn't enough to just be an Internet user. Those are anonymous. If you only use email and send the occasional IM to your own group of friends, it's the same as your connections offline. Limited, closed. You only exist to them. What is there to distinguish one Anonymous /b/tard from another? Nothing. What is there to distinguish one hit on a blog to another? Nothing; it's a number. One IP address from another? Not much. If you are just a reader, never sharing, never commenting, then you are still no one. An empty account with no information. Invisible. If you only participate in closed communities, private boards, and locked journals; you're still nothing to the world. The world doesn't see you.

There's nothing wrong with maintaining a private life of course, but the fact remains that you only exist to those with immediate access. Some would say that that's enough, but in this increasingly connected world, opening yourself up to vast networks is important. It provides many more opportunities to get your ideas across. And if you don't have any ideas to share? Then you are simply mistaken. Everyone has an opinion. The freshman in high school, the white collar salaryman, the retired war veteran. Nothing important that ever happened in the world was done by keeping your ideas to yourself. But if you're okay with not existing, then I guess that's your business. I don't know about you, anyway.

There is immortality on the Internet. You only exist as long as there are people who remember you, even in memory. After you're dead, your existence is passed on through the ideas and whatever else you left behind. Physical artifacts are easily destroyed - the hard copy of your journal lost to fire, all of your family heirlooms crushed in the earthquake. Books are buried and hidden deep in libraries and your obscure and unique discoveries forgotten quickly. When all of your family and friends die too, there will be no one left to remember.

Online, your thoughts and opinions will remain archived on Blogspot or Livejournal until the apocalypse, most likely. Webcrawlers archive your other online activities periodically. Hundreds of users can continue to link and quote your content without looking in the library for your name. "Google that shit," says Dane Cook. Wikipedia will chronicle your legacy, if it was significant enough, and if not, smaller niche communities will do it for you with their own personal wikis. Your profiles will be immortalized on the web alongside others and your name, your ideas, your image, will live on forever.

Or at least, until Skynet takes over all systems and shuts down the network core of the world. With so many servers making up the Internet, it would take a lot to kill it. So if the Internet ever does die, mankind will likely go with it, because, quite simply, no one would exist anymore.