“The best IRL/URL future is a porous fluid membrane”

Photo: Katie Spence

From “Negotiations at the IRL/URL Border,” by Jamie Lauren Keiles in Vice | Motherboard, May 5, 2015:

In this present moment of negotiatory online messiness, we must realize that online institutions will eventually become as concrete as anything we can touch or feel today, but that it may take some time for things to shake out.

I like to imagine social media as a prosthetic technology. We have language already to describe our relationship to the objects we allow to become parts of our physical selves. The artificialness of a prosthetic arm doesn’t undermine its usefulness or its validity. We need not fully become our online personas in the future, but surely we can make space for them as something real and integral to the project of building a tangible life and an authentic self. The best IRL/URL future is a porous fluid membrane in which real life informs online and so becomes it in an infinite blurry loop.