{"id":391,"date":"2026-05-08T17:32:53","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T17:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kishlinden.com\/?p=391"},"modified":"2026-05-08T17:34:29","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T17:34:29","slug":"digital-dualism-and-ambient-presence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kishlinden.com\/?p=391","title":{"rendered":"Digital dualism and ambient presence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Image: A usual night of hanging out online in our early relationship<\/em><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

My friend came over this week and we talked for hours about her work, my work, conflicts, opportunities. At some point the conversation drifted and we found ourselves discussing something I’ve been quietly thinking about for many years: the strange guilt people feel about their online lives. The sense that time spent in digital space is somehow lesser time. That the real stuff, like the real relationships, the real conversations, the real living, only happens in person, with bodies in the same room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I find this assumption worth pushing on, and my friend gave me some language for exploring it. Not because digital life is without its genuine costs and complications, but because the neat division between “online” and “offline” doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and more importantly, it doesn’t hold up to my lived experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Moose and the Art of Ambient Presence<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

My husband, Moose, and I met online. Before we were ever physically in the same room or had even been able to hold hands, we spent four months learning about one another before meeting and another ten months after that building a life together through a screen (with occasional in-person visits). This wasn’t just texting back and forth or the occasional video call. We kept Discord open for eight, sometimes ten hours at a stretch. We were just there, in each other’s peripheral awareness, doing our own work and living our own days, occasionally talking, sometimes not. Sometimes I fell asleep. Sometimes he left to go eat but his empty chair was there. It was less like a phone call and more like sitting in the same house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was, genuinely, one of the most intimate and nourishing things I’ve experienced. And at the time it was what I really needed… a quiet and comforting love that just allowed me to be me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I tell this story partly because people often react with surprise. They have a kind of mild amazement that something real came out of something so digital. But what strikes me now is that what Moose and I were doing was not some compensatory substitute for real closeness. It was its own form of closeness. Ambient presence, the quiet knowledge that someone is there, doing their thing, living alongside you, is something we often associate exclusively with physical cohabitation. We assume you need to share a kitchen to have that experience. We didn’t. We had it across time zones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That experience permanently changed how I think about what presence means and what meaningful relationships can look like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My brother and I (and many others) call it “parallel play”. I went to visit my brother for a week or so and my mom and sister asked what we did the whole time. I said we sat in silence on opposite ends of the condo playing video games while occasionally coming together to talk about what food to order and watch an episode of tv before going back to our spaces. They were both sort of appalled and said that sounded really boring and not like a good use of the little time we’d have together. But for us, this is the best kind of bonding. Just being in one another’s space, being ourselves and enjoying the vibe, is what it is all about sometimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Problem with Digital Dualism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

My friend introduced me to sociologist Nathan Jurgenson and the concept that I’m pushing back on: digital dualism. It’s the belief that digital and physical reality are two separate, competing spheres; that what happens online is somehow less real, less embodied, less meaningful than what happens in person. Under this framework, authentic life is analog and screens are simply a departure from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jurgenson argues that this is a false binary. Most of us don’t actually live in two separate worlds, right? We live in one world that has both physical and digital dimensions, woven together so tightly that pulling them apart is more of a conceptual exercise than a description of how people actually experience their days. Your group chat is not separate from your friendship; it is part of your friendship. The comfort someone feels texting a crisis to a trusted person at 2am is not lesser comfort because it arrived via phone. The grief of losing an online community is not lesser grief because the community wasn’t local.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jurgenson’s critique landed in the early 2010s but it’s arguably more relevant now than when he wrote it. We’ve lived through a pandemic that forced even the most committed “IRL only” people to discover that remote presence can sustain, and in some cases deepen, relationships. We have better language now for what digital community can do. And yet the guilt persists. The sense that screen time is time stolen from real life, rather than time that is real life, in a particular medium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m not arguing that all online engagement is equivalent to all offline engagement, or that there are no meaningful differences between modes of connection. There are. What I’m resisting is the assumed hierarchy that physical presence is the gold standard against which everything else is measured and found wanting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This Is Also a Rural Story<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There’s something else layered into this for me that I want to name, because I think it’s undertheorized in most conversations about digital life, and that’s geography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital dualism is, in part, a luxury position. It is most comfortably held by people who have abundant access to in-person community, who live in dense urban centres where the coffee shop, the community centre, the friend’s apartment are all within reach. For those people, online connection might genuinely function as a supplement, a secondary layer. They can afford to be cavalier about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In rural places, the calculus is entirely different. The nearest specialist is an hour and a half away. The nearest friend might be forty minutes on a winter road. The informal social infrastructure that urbanists take for granted is sparse, spread thin, and increasingly under pressure as populations age and services consolidate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this context, digital connectivity isn’t a substitute for real community. It is community, for many people. The seniors I think about most in my research, like people aging in place in rural Nova Scotia, trying to maintain independence and connection and purpose in communities that weren’t designed to support them easily, are not living in two worlds. They’re living in one world in which digital connection is increasingly the connective tissue that holds their social ecosystem together. A video call with a grandchild in Halifax, or a Facebook group for the local curling club, or a WhatsApp thread with the neighbours who check in when the power goes out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we dismiss this as “less than,” we’re not just philosophically wrong. We’re missing something important about what sustains people in places that have been systematically underserved by physical infrastructure. And we risk designing solutions, for health, aging, and rural economic development, that fail the people they’re supposed to serve because they underestimate what digital presence actually does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What My Kids Are Learning<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

My children are seven and ten. They are growing up in a household where their parents met on the internet, where remote work and remote learning and remote relationships are unremarkable facts of life. They have cousins and grandparents and family friends that they stay connected with almost entirely online. Calls to Grammy to show her school work or read books together are their only way of connecting. My son plays video games with his Uncle as often as possible and calls him his best friend, even though they only physically see one another 3 or 4 times a year. They also see a lot of friends and family in person. They don’t experience any of these relationships as categorically different relationships. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My ten-year-old recently asked me whether a friend she’d made in a multiplayer game was a “real” friend. I said yes, and then I asked her what made her wonder. She said: “Well, I’ve never hugged her.” And we talked about that, about what friendship is made of, about the different ways you can know someone, about presence and attention and care. She wasn’t confused or worried or anything, she was just doing philosophy, the way kids do when they haven’t yet worked something out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want my kids to develop genuine discernment about their digital lives, not uncritical absorption, but not reflexive guilt either. I want them to be able to ask: Is this connection nourishing? Is this community genuine? Is this time I’m spending in a way that feels good? Those are the right questions and really ones that we should all be asking about our offline lives, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I don’t want to hand them is a framework that tells them the screen is always the problem. That the real stuff always happens elsewhere. Because I know, from my own life, that isn’t true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Living in One World<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Moose and I have been sharing a physical home for months now. We still sit quietly in a room together pretty often. Our comfort level with one another was immediately perfect. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think about my friend on the couch the other day and the realness of that conversation and how we both walked away feeling connected and “more human” (her words). That was real and lovely and we immediately planned to do it again soon. But the months apart from my now husband were also real. I have friends online who I have never met and who know me better than some of the people I’ve known my whole life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We live in one world. It just has more dimensions than we used to admit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Image: A usual night of hanging out online in our early relationship My friend came over … Digital dualism and ambient presence<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":398,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_vp_format_video_url":"","_vp_image_focal_point":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kishlinden.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kishlinden.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kishlinden.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kishlinden.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kishlinden.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=391"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/kishlinden.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":400,"href":"https:\/\/kishlinden.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391\/revisions\/400"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kishlinden.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kishlinden.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kishlinden.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kishlinden.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}