Quarterlife v. "real" life

This blog is part of a new initiative I launched in my own life to try to connect with social media and the whole Web 2.0 movement. I have a facebook profile, I have a flickr page (see first post), I'm doing this blog, and I even gave Second Life a spin. The initiative is born out of a commitment I have to authentic criticism. W. H. Auden argued that criticism of art (and life, by extension) requires "a vast experience of all artistic activities" (see "The Mental Kitchen" in the Readings feature of Harper's, December 2007 -- sorry, it's what I'm reading now, so you're stuck with it for the moment).

I had been offering ignorant criticism of social media as actually being pseudo-social media. What I mean is that it seemed ironic to me that everyone was turning to mediation (which the Internet is) as a new method of social interaction. If you want to have connection to more people or a broader or deeper connection with some, why would you turn to a digital interface rather than to the actual living faces, voices, embraces of those people? Does online interaction get you closer to people or act as yet another barrier between you and the "authentic" world?

Clearly, there is much to debate in the above, and much debating I have done. I have engaged on this topic mostly with younger people, acknowledging that at the ripe old age of 38 I might be so out of touch with the world of twenty-somethings and teens that I risk appearing like the grumpy old men in the SNL skit from the 80s that I'm old enough to remember.

There are two important things I learned from these debates. First, that social media do not replace direct interaction in most cases for most users. They augment it. There are exceptions -- those geeks who seem to live out their entire lives online in fantasy scenarios -- but those exceptions of antisocial reclusivity are not new to 2008 or created by new technology. Second, my criticism of social media was ignorant, as I stated above, because I had not experienced it. In my conversations on the topic, it quickly became clear that I needed to either stop judging social media or dive in and see what it's all about.

As I took the plunge, I encountered something called "Quarterlife." It's an Internet-only TV show (is it really TV if it's not on TV? -- this will be a moot point soon: Quarterlife will debut as an NBC series in February) born on MySpace.com. It has since migrated to its own Web site (check it out here: http://www.quarterlife.com/index.php) with lots of features in addition to the now 21 short episodes of the show (and counting).

It's created by the writing/producing team of Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the creators of thirty something and My So-Called Life. I quite like the show and have watched every episode. The thing that fascinates me most is how the show and the Web site incorporate social media into a crazy cycle of hyperreality that French philosopher Jean Beaudrillard would have a field day unpacking.

Let's see if I can do it justice. It's a show that appears only online as part of an online community (first MySpace and now Quarterlife) about a group of twenty-something friends seen partially through the lens of character Dylan Krieger's videoblog that appears on a Web site that is part of an online community. But wait, there's more: The show's Web site also has social networking features like viewer profiles complete with blogs, videoblogs, photo galleries, "friends" networks, music, etc. Even more interesting, the characters of the show have their own profile pages where they blog and post videos, photos, etc. -- in character. Then, viewers, many of whom have their own profile pages, post comments on the characters' posts, often treating the characters as if they were real people.

OK, so you have so many layers of reality, with art imitating life imitating art and so on that I think my brain is going to explode. In the middle of all this, I think it is worth asking the question, What is real? Does it matter? Is interaction really "social" when you're interacting with a fictional character in a virtual environment? I don't have the answer, but I think I have a much better feel for the question.