The Great Offline

Real Life editor Nathan Jurgenson coined the term “digital dualism” to describe the false presumption of a clean line between the online and the offline. Like the nature/culture binary, the online/offline distinction stems from a misguided preoccupation with authenticity. It frames our relationship with technology in terms of either connection of

The concepts of the “offline world” and the “wilderness” function as vessels into which we pour our frustrations with contemporary life: They are defined by what they don’t contain, rather than what they do. It is entirely possible to abandon the fantasy of “the offline” as the seat of the real, while remaining critical about the ways contemporary

In shifting the emphasis from what one is doing with the screen to how often one looks at it, we also shift the emphasis away from the worlds we are building collectively, and towards how we are inhabiting them individually.

The “offline world” and the “wilderness” function as vessels for our frustrations with contemporary life: They are defined by what they don’t contain, rather than what they do

The construction of screen time as the moral evil responsible for this fall figures screen time and offline time as two sharply distinct and yet internally homogeneous catego

As concepts, “wilderness” and “the offline” are deeply enmeshed. Both offer mythologies of ahistoricity and unaccountability, an escape clause from the dilemmas of a globalized world. They cloak themselves in the language of embodiment (the wind in your hair, the sand under your feet), while offering up the fantasy of moving through the world witho