Many differentiate between their internet life and their life outside the internet as OL (online) and IRL (in real life). I too used to use the term IRL to make this differentiation, but the more and more I think about it, the less and less I think it works. Why? Because the more and more I think about it, the more and more it becomes apparent that our online world is part of "real" life. Rather than thinking of the internet as separate from our consensus reality (the "reality" that society for the most part agrees on), we should think of it as an extension of it. It's like having a home life and a work life; they're different parts of the same reality. Now we just need to add to that list the "internet life".
I think it is especially important to make this addition because there are many, many people who do not realize or take into account that our internet lives affect our non-internet lives. Things we say and do online can and will have consequences in our immediate lives, whether we intend them to or not. For instance, back when I was in grade school, a friend and I had things we were saying on the internet come to face us in reality. Long story short, things we said online angered people, and those people decided that they wanted to come and confront us in person and get into a physical altercation about it. Luckily for us, there were other people around, including adults who could take care of the situation. Needless to say, things that were said online nearly got out of control. If online things were truly not IRL, then nothing would have happened. These people wouldn't have done anything and things would have continued as if it didn't exist.
It seems to me that people think that the online world isn't IRL because sometimes we're dealing with people we've never met and probably never will meet, so the feeling is that there will be no consequence. The problem is that people we do know and could end up meeting are also privvy to whatever we post or say online because, to put it blatantly, this is the world wide web. Anyone and everyone with access to the internet can see it, regardless of "privacy" settings that the websites instill. Something we say about someone could reach that person in one way or another and there could be backlash. I see this all the time on websites like failbook.failblog.org that screencap things on facebook (fb) and post them to the site; there are people who call out there bosses or say crappy things about their bosses on fb, seemingly forgetting that they have their bosses on their friends lists. This scenario is just an example, but of course there are others.
Such as bullying that goes from the face-to-face world to the online world. Whether over instant messengers, on youtube, on blogs, on forums or whatever, bullying goes to the extreme. From my perspective, it looks like people think that just because they are doing this in the online world that there will be no consequences. But there are consquences. Perhaps it won't be something like the bully getting sent down to the principal's office, but these things affect people's lives. People kill themselves over things said on the internet, or in less severe scenarios no longer want to participate in daily activities or they end up feel terrible about themselves, just like can happen "IRL". I realize that bullying happens with or without the internet, but it seems that with the internet especially, and therefore the loss of face-to-face a lot of the time, people are increasingly vicious because they have distance between them. They feel protected by this falsely perceived wall.
That's not to say that only bad things come out of the internet, because good things do, too, which is another reason that I think people need to stop excluding the online world from the "real" world. There are people I speak to online, who I consider to be my friends, that I likely would not have met had I not had the internet. These are people that live provinces or even countries away from me, so it's only because of the internet that I know them. In addition to that, the internet has allowed me to stay in touch with friends that have now moved away or that I had lost contact with over the years. So if we separate the internet from "IRL" does that mean that these conversations I have with these people aren't real? Does that mean that these friends I've made don't actually exist? I think not.
The internet really allows us to connect as a community on scales that perhaps would never be acheived otherwise; there are websites I've come across that touch people's lives, including my own. For instance, organizations such as To Write Love On Her Arms (twloha.com) are not only able to raise funds for charity because of the internet, but it also brings people hope and even saves lives. If that's not part of the "real world" then I don't know what is.
To sum up, I think that everything should be considered a part of the real world because everything affects us as human beings. Even something like a book, movie or video game shapes how we view things, even if we don't realize it. Even if it's not something tangible, that doesn't mean it's not real. Going by that principle, that only tangible things are real, then our emotions would not be real, our thoughts would not be real, our words would not be real, air would not be real, because these are things that we cannot physically touch. Our definitions of reality, then, are perhaps skewed and are what we need to reshape to fit in with today's world.
Part of the problem, too, I think, is that generally speaking we don't know how to talk about the non-internet world in relation to the internet one. Although I am of the mind that both are real, I also find myself tripping over what to call the world that is not that internet. Yet, maybe it's as simple as referring to them as the online and offline world, rather than the online and IRL world. Whether we refer to them like that or not, I still don't find that OL and IRL fit because, as I keep saying, both are real. Both affect us and we need to realize this.
