CONCEPT Over recent decades, our use of digital spaces has steadily increased. As their sophistication has developed, so has our dependency on them. Our communication, memories, and information – all of it now exists in the digital sphere. Because so much of our lives have shifted online, our understanding of what is real has also shifted. Before, we understood reality as objective observations and facts; now, it is much more nebulous and undefined. The digital world exists but cannot be seen, touched, or smelled. It can be invented or augmented from standard reality and edited and manipulated by multiple users. It is no longer straightforward to know what ‘real’ really is.

It is a question that goes beyond just the world we experience around us. We also have to question our own identities. We can create and recreate multiple and malleable digital presences and avatars through games and social media. These avatars interact with us and might express our inner feelings better than we can in the traditional “reality” due to context and culture. But with these multiple versions and representations of ourselves, how do we know who we are, and how do we know who anyone else is?

Even before 2020, people interacted increasingly in the digital world and less in person. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, that trend accelerated faster than anyone could have imagined. Our work, education, and social lives suddenly became entirely online. Indeed, this year, our digital selves are often the only way we interact, and the digital sphere is the only one we inhabit. As we enter 2021, we are caught between the desire to return to “normal” and the regressive waves of the pandemic. No doubt the digital reality is here to stay, but we are also experiencing the fatigue of a purely online experience of the world. The overlaps between the two realities shift and evolve in constant dynamic tension.