Whenever we talk of the digital divide we mostly, if not always, portray it as something quite undesirable, as a threat to social equality, as the great gulf between the digital haves and the digital have-nots, forgetting that there is such as thing as the digital wants and the digital want-nots.
For all its blessings, the digital world is not necessarily desired by all.
A few years ago, I ran across the acronym RL (Real Life) which didn't scare me as much then as it does now--now that I've had time to consider all of its implications.
And one of them is that when the virtual citizen (which is a digital citizen gone a little extreme) talks about RL in his or her emails or text messages, Real Life is often being referred to as an alien thing, something outside the reality of the digital conversation or relationship, as something foreign.
And therein lies the danger.
Every now and then, I receive a letter from Sweden, from an old friend who likes to write long missives in beautiful cursive. These letters arrive in my RL mailbox as thick envelopes with lots of canceled Swedish stamps.
I treat these letters with reverence; and I usually brew some tea before I sit down to read them, savoring not only the touch of the paper, and the so familiar inky path across the page, but also the smell of the paper and the ink, and yes, of the apartment where it was written. It's a lot more RL than an email, let's put it that way.
One day the post office will stop delivering paper letters. Mark my words. There'll be no need, for no one is writing them any more, and that will be the death knell of RL as we know it. By this time--thirty, forty, fifty years from now?--the digital world will have taken over, will be everywhere; and there will, by survival necessity, be no digital divide whatever. This will be a time when without access you cannot work, communicate, live. A time when life is lived online or otherwise hooked up. A time when living off the grid means no Internet access, something which may one day be deemed illegal.
Yes, it's an Orwellian outlook, but I want to hold it up as a contrast: for there is a lot to be said for the Real World; for meeting people in person rather than on dating sites; for writing your letters longhand with care and forethought; for entering the bookstore and browse real books (rather than amazoning them); for perusing a music store rather than downloading iPod tracks.
Some writers still write their novels in longhand--feeling, they say, a higher sense of connection with the word than when typing it on a laptop keyboard. Some readers still attend author readings, just to meet the writer and to hear the story in his or her own voice. Very RL.
Don't get me wrong, email lets me stay in contact with more of my friends than ever before, ebooks save on trees, ditto for enews. But we must draw the line somewhere this side of RL so that we don't lose it altogether in the overwhelming drive to bridge the digital divide.
We must retain the power of choice to stay off-grid if that is how we live life the best.
Thanks, Ulf for the reminders of RL. I used to stay with my grandmother in the summer and every morning she would brew a pot of tea, and then sit at the breakfast table and write letters to friends and family. It was a ritual with her and your blog brought it all back.