Is this the real world?

I vividly remember one of my first lectures at university. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I vividly remember one line in one of my first lectures at University: “There’s no such thing as common sense”.

It’s a perspective that has held me in good stead. Whilst what I see as common sense might not be what you see as common sense. Viewing the world through a lens that assumes everyone has the same world view is very dangerous, and makes the delivery of any meaningful change next to impossible.

Sometimes this comes from the way in which different groups use the same word to describe radically different concepts. For example, it took me a good few months to rearrange my mental models so that when I heard the word “Developers” in the world of social housing I pictured people with bricks and concrete rather than people sitting at laptops cutting code. The first few weeks were very confusing.

This polymorphism of words can exist between different industries, professions and cultures. It exists within as well as inside organisations – just ask people to define a term like product or customer to hear a dozen different, and equally right, definitions.

I’ve been thinking recently about the “common sense” that is being applied to the term In Real Life, or IRL in l33tspeak.

What on earth does IRL mean in 2023?

I asked a few people recently. On LinkedIn (is LinkedIn real life? I know for certain it isn’t a statistically relevant sample).

The discussion was fascinating, showing a breadth of views from exclusively non-digital through to anything that is synchronous.

There is, of course, no right answer. What we choose to be our own personal real life is up to us. But there are a huge number of questions…

Does having a conversation on Zoom or Teams constitute real life?

What about a telephone call?

Would watching TV with friends and family constitute an IRL experience?

What about going to the theatre?

How about meeting people in virtual environments?

Conversing on social networks?

There are many more questions, none of them conclusively resolvable.

Another snippet of my university days that I’ve frequently thought about for the last 30 years is the post-modernist concept of hyperreality, a term coined by the French sociologist Baudrillard. In concise form, hyperreality is the inability to be able to distinguish between reality and a simulation of reality.

There was a thought experiment that Baudrillard constructed to explore this idea. Imagine a car, but in place of windows there are television screens. The screens show a film of a journey from the various in-car perspectives. For a passenger in this hyperreal car, is there any real difference in their experience of their journey that being in a real car? (Obviously there is a big difference at the end of the journey).

So far, so French post-Modernist sociology.

But our real world is now so confused with a simulation of reality that the concept of IRL is next to impossible to define. Even in 100% in-person, physical experiences it’s difficult to discern in a world dominated by brands (a complete confection of fiction) and work where we are assigned “roles”.

Roles are what you give actors.

This confusion has been mounting for decades. Baudrillard was writing about this stuff in the early 1980s when a computer in the home was a box that attached to a TV. Now we carry computers in our pockets, portals to all sorts of lives, real or imagined. In Real Life is increasingly moderated and altered by technology.

Remember that next time you blur your background to try to imagine that all your washing is folded and ironed. Because your IRL and someone else’s IRL aren’t the same.