Today, someone twittered the following: “Existential question: when I do not post to the social network, does it still exist? Mind-blowing, right? ” On first glance, this seemed like an in-joke for those of us who spend a lot – perhaps too much – time online. Yet it quickly struck me that this might be a rather useful question to ask as something like a mini-culmination of a lot of my thinking lately (yeah, I just said that). If you do not ‘make yourself present’ online, if you do not document yourself in the new public space, do you exist?

Let’s take a look at the original “If a tree falls…” question. At root, it is about the relationship of the individual to objective reality, of something between human perception and a reality that might transcend us. Does something occur outside of human apprehension and, even when we accept that it might, does it matter to us when we entirely unaware of its happening?

The question’s concerns are largely those of late Enlightenment philosophy: what can we know?; how much can we know?; and what are the limits and preconditions of knowledge? But while these issues are of course still up for debate, they seem to of less concern to us now. We have generally reconciled ourselves to the idea that subjectivity constrains what we might know and is roughly the determining factor when it comes to the limits of human knowledge. While it is ultimately a subject of faith, we seem to have agreed that in order to function, we have to accept that the universe will continue to work according to the laws of physics and will sustain its existence from day-to-day.

So, if these are the issues surrounding “If a tree falls…?”, then what are those for “If you didn’t Twitter it…?”? If the original question grappled with the relationship between the individual and objective reality, ‘did you post it to a social network?’ deals with the relationship between the individual and the social, the private and the public, the singular person and the multiplicity of the new public space.

Humans are inherently social. The entire process of becoming human – the entrance into language, culture, belief systems etc. – happens through interaction with other human beings. The social, in both the literal and the abstract, is (one could argue) the fundamental aspect of being human. Now, if the social is about both the current and latent connection with others – i.e. actually connecting with others in real-time or feeling like one can – then the internet represents the deferral and displacement of the social into an abstract, virtual space that one orients one’s physical self in relation to. “If a tree falls” is a threat to human subjectivity because it points to its limits; “If you didn’t Twitter it…” is a threat to human individuality because it lays bare the need for the other.

So the real question isn’t so much “If I didn’t Twitter it, did it happen?” as much as it is “If I never Twittered it, did it matter?”. When the social is, as I tend to argue, the persistent network and text of the internet, the omnipresent virtual space that has become society-by-proxy, we are increasingly moving toward a time when one must write one’s-self into the online public space in order to ‘make oneself real’. In much the same way that “If a tree falls…” is a question for the Enlightenment and its new concern with subjectivity, then “If I didn’t Twitter it…” is a question for our time and our new concern the virtual-social.

[Update]: When I said ‘our new concern with the virtual-social’, I guess I meant the the movement of what constitutes the social into the deferred abstract space of the internet. It should be noted that I am not talking about ‘screens’ per se – that people are to be found on LCD monitors. Rather, what I mean is the place of the social and the Other in consciousness and the imagination will increasingly be ‘found’ (i.e. not found) in the virtual. As an analogy, think of religion as an ordering principle – you cannot find it anywhere, but it is nonetheless a system that organises life: how we see ourselves, how we apprehend the world, how we confront and perceive each other are all inflected, coloured and determined by this thing that exists and yet cannot be actually pinned down to a location. And if it sounds like I’m hyperbolically saying that the internet will replace God, then so be it: in the case of the internet, I’d rather err on the side of hyperbole than conservative caution.