this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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I would classify "terminally online" as almost exclusively interacting with people online with little to no IRL at all. A bit part of that would also be that the people you interact with are people you've never seen.
I’ll also add another major sign is if you don’t know their irl names. I have close friends who I met over the pandemic who live far away, but we knew each other by name and hear each other’s voices. That’s a big thing. Your Twitter/tumblr mutuals or people you regularly interact with on Reddit/Lemmy are people that terminally online people will think of as friends rather than “no we’ve never met irl but we play d&d together or have a book club over discord”.
The other big thing is whether or not you go to irl events. Just literally being somewhere that’s neither home nor work/school helps so much.
To be fair, DnD is one of those things I would never ever even consider playing over discord unless I considered you a very good friend, and even then it's begrudgingly. Discord dnd sucks balls.
Being honest doesn't mean telegraphing every impulse to the surface and acting on it. A toddler does that and it's considered bratty, a behavior to be corrected.
Being IRL means having immediate feedback on our actions. No extended diatribes using cut outs of their speech. No linking to articles to convince a person. It becomes a test of the social abilities of each individual and how well they can listen and speak. It flexes different skills than reading and writing.
Try to buy from a salesman in person vs online to see the difference. IRL is vastly different from online. IRL also has the added effect of "fuck around, find out" with no down time. If you say something distasteful then you learn about it before you're done talking by the expressions and reactions of those around you. Acting like you have been is a quick ticket to lonersville, which is probably why you're so angry at the idea that IRL is different from online. Get out and talk to strangers. See how they react to your need to interrupt, dissect, and "win" when they werent arguing. People want to share information, not stand atop some invisible social pyramid.