Virtual reality: the virtual is the reality

(it has been 5 years since i was stuck in the net.)

Virtual reality: the virtual is the reality

"I think therefore I am."

So one's existence lies where his mind is. That is how I've come to the realization that participating in an internet chat room is a "real" , not a "virtual", life experience.

Nothing virtual about it

I've found myself in a strange mode ever since I wandered into the HuaXia Forum one year ago. While I had surfed the internet extensively before that, I used it as a convenient extension of the conventional media. The chat room was quite a different thing. The discussions were lively, enlightening and interactive (it was at the end of this Forum's best time). Almost immediately it became a routine for me to visit this and various other chat rooms whenever I had a break, which was a lot, because I mostly did my work on computer. In no time, my desire to be part of the discussion was not to be suppressed. Compared to the regulars, those who posted on the Forum daily with multiple lengthy postings, my involvement appeared negligible: less than one per day in odd hours, early in the morning or late at night, in a span of 6 months.

However, this was "achieved" with great restraint that I had to impose on myself, because I was burdened with guilt and scared by the obsession: my mind was often there when I was not! During my commute, for example, instead of listening to radio, I would be thinking about the discussions and composing my own responses. So the more I was attracted to it, the harder I tried to get away from it.

I don't remember encountering anything even remotely this addictive. The richness of individual ideas and the inter-activeness are enchanting and intoxicating.

It is an intimate communication between minds made possible by a new technology. It is simultaneously secretive and revealing: secretive because almost all of us hide our "real" identity; revealing because we invariably express a lot of "deep thoughts" which we somehow withhold from people we physically know. Thus, it is truly a new life experience.

An emotional one, too, I might add. Though obsessed, people also treat it lightly, convinced that it is just a play. Yet each one of us knows how much we are pleased or hurt by it, "really", not "virtually". More so than in real life: being secretive, it is hardly resistible to be ruthless and nasty; "spilling guts", one becomes touchy and vulnerable.

So it is all too real, heart and mind

Obssesion grows a life of its own, often making me feel like its carrier. It was silly when I dreamed of typing "www...." It was unpleasant that I became absently-minded tending the daily routine while the mind waging in some vigorous arguments with "who-knows-whom". It also seemed particularly worrisome that it was the mind being obsessed with itself, not some third objects, like gambling or cigarettes.

Thus my reluctance. I gather my limited power to restrict my own access to the forum, not because of lack of interest, but because it can so completely occupy the mind that it even squeezes out other significant things in life, say, family and "real" friends. And daily mundane. To me, this "virtual" world can be too "real" to be a good thing.

Really.