What's wrong with our second social life?

During last session, I saw such positive points on the second life online, as in the virtual community full of avatars where we could become whoever we want, regardless of the constraints we are born with, or in the certain ethnic groups which we are obsessed with and thus we can find people to share common interests. Since the second life can be such ideal and utopian, what if we shift our focus from our real life to this second life? Instead of making real friends, we follow and be followed by lots of netizens; instead of struggling in workplace, we build great achievements in virtual community and get virtual fortune and fame; while living in a shabby house in real life, we have built fancy mansions and live a luxury virtual life. Certainly this second life would be of no meaning to people around us or to the society. But would such second life make sense to the individuals? 

When reflecting this question, I recalled an art exhibit I saw in Shanghai. The artist burnt all her photos and rewrote her whole life experience in words and paintings. She exhibited such a fake autobiography of herself and questioned audience: does reality really matter, if all the memories are gone? Could people rebuild their own memories and make everyone including themselves believe in the second life built? I find her point is quite closely related to the second life we talk about. Our real life and the life we represent on the social media, which one matters?

There actually is not a certain answer, as far as I'm concerned. If your real life sucks and you couldn't care less about what people around think about you, then second life is the perfect shelter for you. Various ICTs are devoted to solve human's social, emotional or self-complacent problems and it's really hard to find faults with them. However, based on my own experiences, few problems can be really solved this way, in the second life. Our real life would still prevails eventually and then all our devotion to the second life remains vacuous. 

Do you have the similar experience? When you post a photo of you pretending that you had such a great time with a bunch of people who you're not really close with, you may not feel satisfied deep inside even the photo got hundreds of "likes" and friendly jealousy words of your followers. Then why do people still do that? Since we are accustomed to turn to devices to get an instant gratification of our emotional need. "I share therefore I am".

But people's emotional needs are just too complex to fulfill. Just as it is put in Sherry Turkle's Ted Talk:

Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding.And we clean them up with technology. And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection. We short-change ourselves. And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring. 

Technology tend to help us in so many dimensions which may never encounter so much frustration as when it's related to people's social life. As illustrated by Gonzelas (2014) and Sherry Turkle, Technology not only failed in help us communicate with others, but transfers the way we think and treat ourselves, which may even do harm to our self-esteem.

Sherry remains positive towards this issue and so am I. Where technology fails, we can do on our own and let it be the icing on the cake. with that said, I'll stop here and grab a meal with my friends offline. ;-)