With a title like "The Internet Is Real Life" I was hoping this article was going to blow my socks off.

It didn't.

Oh, there are a few interesting observations, such as:

Right-wing memes are displacing African-American Vernacular English as the most dynamic source of linguistic innovation.

Indeed, even the language that people use to talk about the need for more in-person, authentically “human” interaction occurs in an internet vernacular. When someone tells you that you are extremely online, or need to “touch grass,” they are–intentionally or not–confessing that they too have had their brain colonized by internet cliches.

But on the whole, it didn't have the punch I was looking for, despite repeatedly coming up close to it.

We are at odds with the medium in which many of us spend our whole day. We are terminally online, but we don't think it's a good thing...or at least it feels bad to say accept the new normal of mediating almost everything in our life through a screen and a keyboard. How can you smell the roses when the roses are pixels on your screen?

Torenberg turns the article's gaze on the media landscape and sure I suppose that's important. But I'm more interested in who I am becoming, this being who maintains most of its relationships through the internet. Surely, it's distorting me in some way, but it's difficult to discern how.

Towards the end of his article, Torenberg makes this observation:

But many fewer have taken steps to stay ahead of the curve in the informational environment that it has created. They have let themselves become prey–or rather, let themselves remain prey–in the face of deteriorating consensus about the nature of reality itself.

The "prey" language caught my attention. Survival of the fittest explains many things in this world. So, if the internet is the new jungle in which we apes find ourselves living, what might cut short our survival?