The World of Internet : Real or Virtual?

Once I asked a friend of mine whether he ever joins chat, blogs, discussion fora on the internet. Hearing me asking this, he shrugged off his broad shoulder and he affirmatively said, "No and never ever." "But why? Why are you so up in arms against internet culture?" I tried to pinch him seductively.

He shot back point blank at me. He said that he loved to live in the real world and never thought of living in the killing fields of virtual world as there is no or there shoild not be any perceptible reality in that so-called virtual world. He opined that virtual world is a stale world, a dirty cheap world. And a virtual world is like a world of nothingness. Why should we ever keep shy of the world of verdant splendour? Being there is akin to a feeling of belongingness. How can we afford to fight back the grim reality of belongingness just by overhauling it? Yes, it is a dirty cheap world. And there is no denying of the fact.

"A dirty cheap world? What do you mean?" I fired back.

"Yes, I mean what I say. It is not only very cheap, but dirty to the core. Enough is enough. There is nothing serious, nobody serious. It has corrupted and polluted the entire world culture and psyche. It is just teasing, appeasing and molly-cooddling our libido and that libido as it were is the summum bonnum of our existence. Examles are aplenty. This perversion is going on and on. It is doing more harm than good."

"But so many people are involed in this in so many ways. What is the bugbear as such?"

"The bugbear is cultural perversion. Nobody is serious about it and nothing is commited seriously. I've asked many people what they actually do on the internet. They could not answer convincingly. This so-called virtual world provides us with oodles of dry informations and datas. There is no objective reality. It is disastrous..."

I thought a while and kept on thinking. Is there no serious discussion? Everything is a storm over a breakfast tea? I do have my own options and reservations. Are those dry informations and datas not value-added? Can they not prompt us to churn objective reality out of this? Cheap they may be in some cases and dirty also in some other cases but the bottomline remains the same: it has come to stay, my friend agrees or not.