Digital dualism

Digital dualism denotes the attitude, cyberspace or the virtual world and the sensually perceptible, real world formed a contrast. Digital dualism is a widespread belief that also shapes media reporting on social media , but is rejected by specialized sociologists.

background

The term goes back to Nathan Jurgenson , who thinks it is the result of a fallacy. He defines digital dualism as the attitude that the digital world is virtual , while the analog world is real. Jurgenson uses the construction of the film The Matrix as an analogy , in which the matrix stands for the virtual world and Zion for the real one.

This attitude can be traced back to early work on the theory of Internet communication, as it is e.g. B. Sherry Turkle in her 1984 book Second Self .

Digital dualism is often applied to identity management, as Philippe Wampfler notes:

“Dualism is also a widespread position with regard to our personality: It pretends that we have a fixed identity that manifests itself in the physical world (via our appearance, our behavior, our properties, etc.). In the virtual world, we then presented facets of this identity, actual distorted images, often provided with pseudonyms or avatars. Here, too, a threat to our identity is quickly identified: Through the virtual fragmentation we could lose ourselves, we could forget who we really are and what we need. "

- Philippe Wampfler : Facebook, blogs and wikis at school: A social media guide , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2013, ISBN 978-3-525-70165-2 , p. 45.

Examples

Digital dualists separate, for example:

1. Profiles on social media as virtual identities of real roles that people take on in their lives
2. virtual relationships and conversations between those that take place without the aid of technology
3. geographic locations from their virtual representation on a map ( geotag )
4. political activism from digital activism (also called hacktivism or slacktivism)

criticism

The main criticism against digital dualism comes from the view of augmented reality , which Jurgenson also represents:

“A conceptualization and a theory of the Internet - and, more generally, of spaces and places - should look like this: Digital and physical realities dialectically construct each other. Let's take social networks like MySpace and Facebook as an example: They cannot be distinguished from the real world, but have to do with it - just as the physical world has to do with digitized social processes. We can no longer think of the "real" as the opposite of "online". Instead, we need a paradigm that takes into account the implosion of the world of bits and atoms into an augmented reality. "

- Nathan Jurgenson : quoted from Philippe Wampfler: Facebook, blogs and wikis at school: A social media guide. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013, ISBN 978-3-525-70165-2 , pp. 45f.

Also Zeynep Tufecki argued as to technology have always extended the physical world by having given the people the opportunity to separate symbolic communication by the presence of the body. If there were a physical world that was separate from the real, it would have existed since human speech was written down, argue critics of digital dualism.

In practice, it is certainly possible to describe interactions between virtual and real processes that speak against separation. Relationships today often have a virtual and a real dimension that cannot be separated. For many people, orientation in geographical space takes place exclusively via the virtual representation of the space on their smartphones .

In the German-language discussions, Volker Frederking and Axel Krommer pointed out that the criticism of digital dualism also has consequences for media education because, at least on the Internet, it can no longer assume that the separation of real, everyday primary experience and mediality awareness are a meaningful goal can, because “between reality and mediality” there are “complex interdependencies”.

literature

• Nicholas Carr: Digital Dualism Denialism. Rough Type, 2013
• Nathan Jurgenson: Digital dualism versus augmented reality. Cybergology: The Society Pages 24, 2011

Individual evidence

1. ↑ z. B. the authors of Cyborgology
2. ^ ^{A b} Nathan Jurgenson: Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality. In: Cyborgology. February 24, 2011.
3. ↑ Sherry Turkle: Second Self. ( Memento of the original from September 11, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. MIT Press, ISBN 978-0-262-70111-2 
4. ↑ Zeynep Tufecky: We Were Always human. In: Neil L. Whitehead, Michael Wesch (Eds.): Human No More. Digital Subjectivities, Un-Human Subjects, and the End of Anthropology. University of Colorado Press, Boulder (California) 2012, ISBN 978-1-607-32170-5
5. ↑ Volker Frederking, Axel Krommer: German lessons and media education in the age of digitization. In this. and Thomas Möbius (Ed.): Digital Media in German Classes. Schneider Verlag Hohengehren, Baltmannsweiler 2014, ISBN 978-3-8340-0507-6 . Pp. 150–182, here: p. 160