virtually all of us decide to value stuff that's not real

Perhaps I'm a little slow, so forgive me if you've seen this thought elsewhere, but over the past few days it's occurred to me that a lot of the recent and current hand-wringing about virtual friends and virtual living and, well, virtual everything, is a tad overblown.

And the reason I began to think so was a random thought about my own life growing up, because I had a lot of very powerful and formative experiences that were entirely virtual. Only the technology used to deliver those experiences was different than that of today... a tad more analog.

My virtual experiences were delivered by movies, TV and books.

Hawkeye and Trapper John weren't real, but I began to ape their jokes. Johnny Fever wasn't real, but he taught me that there was another way to deal with authority. Luke Skywalker wasn't real, but (spoiler alert for the very slow) I shared his devastation at the death of Obi-Wan. Julius Caesar hasn't been real for about 2000 years, but Isaac Asimov's book about the Roman Republic brought him to life for me.

I mean, what kind of existence did radio stars of the 1940s have to their audiences, other than as virtual presences in millions of families' living rooms? What kind of existence does Tom Cruise or Angelina Jolie have to you and me, other than as lights on a movie screen, blurry images on TMZ, or names in Pink is the New Blog? They have no relation to our physical everyday lives, and yet they seem to have meaning or value to us.

It's not computers or the Internet that are fostering virtual living. It's our technology, period. For thousands of years that technology was writing and painting – both weird biological/mechanical hybrids – but even before that, as soon as some Greek poet sat down and began to figure out in his head rhymes and lines about some warriors names Achilles and Hector, we began to live virtually. Language allowed us to live slightly outside of the "real" reality, and share other "made up" realities. And really, how different is that from a game of Dungeons and Dragons?

I'm not saying that Facebook and World of Warcraft are on par with the Iliad. But the realization that we've been doing this to ourselves for the past several thousand years suddenly makes me a lot more circumspect about judging the effects of technology, or thinking that the good old days are somehow manifestly different from today.

That's all.