Real life

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Poster with the question "How Is This Real Life ??", Women's March on Washington on January 21, 2017

Real Life ( English , translated: "real life", "real life", sometimes also meat life , for example: "carnal life"), usually referred to as RL for short , is a term from the Internet scene that is used as a term for Life of a person outside of their virtual activities on the Internet.

The attempt to reduce Internet use and the associated “return to real life” is known as a digital detox .

The concept of real life has a long tradition as a demarcation between real life and fictionality and can be traced back to Fyodor Dostoevsky in literature . With the advent of online role-playing games (MMORPG), the term found its way into network culture, also driven by literary publications such as the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson from 1984. There is not real life, but meat life die Speech that separates the real life of the protagonists from their existence in cyberspace .

The term is used, for example, by the users of multi-user dungeons to delimit the virtual identity in role-playing games from the identity of the player in reality. The term is now used by many computer users to refer to the world outside of the Internet, for example to clarify whether people who have found each other over the Internet have already met in person. In discussions and chats on the Internet, this term is used to refer to relationships outside of the purely digital or virtual identity.

In contrast to real life, there is life in virtual reality . In online role-playing games, but also in social networks , users can create a new personality. This ranges from small details, which should make your own person appear more interesting, to the creation of an avatar with a special appearance and special abilities in MMOGs .

Some sociologists estimate that the distinction between real life and virtual reality is becoming increasingly obsolete, since with the increasing spread of the Internet, people naturally move online more often and social networks or other forms of virtual communication supplement or even partially replace actual encounters.

Web links

Wiktionary: Reallife  - Explanations of meanings, word origins , synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://dostoyevsky.thefreelibrary.com/The-Idiot/4-1#real+life
  2. ^ Don Slater (2002): Social Relationships and Identity On-line and Off-line . In Leah, Sonia, Lievrouw, Livingstone: Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs . Sage Publications Inc. pp. 533-543. ISBN 0-7619-6510-6 .