It opens with some voice over: “About a year ago, I
realized that every time I looked at a teenager, they had an electronic device
in their hand, a device that was connected to the internet.” The film
immediately adopts a very serious and even dark tone, as if it’s uncovering a
mystery or crime. The narrator says: “I always have and always will believe
that the internet could be the instrument by which we deliver the full promise
of human creativity. But perhaps it’s time we ask ourselves, Have we outsourced
our children to the internet?”
The first teenagers the film introduces us to are two
boys who enjoy watching internet porn. They are looking at a list of porn
categories and explaining them, which is interesting in itself, for they assume
the adults behind the camera have not heard of such things as bondage. And they
talk about how masturbating to internet porn is part of their daily routine.
The film spends quite a bit of time on this subject, the interviewer even asking
questions about specific images on the boys’ computer screens. But teenagers
have always looked at porn. That’s not the question. The question is how their
being online affects their lives and development. The boys talk about their own
perceptions of how sex on the internet has affected the way they look at girls
in real life. But what the film fails to address is how this is any different
from, say, looking at pornographic magazines in the 1980s. What is it
specifically about these images being online rather than in magazines or on a
videocassette that has created a change in teenagers?
The film gets more on track with its next subject, a
fifteen-year-old named Page (although she is presented in shadow, so perhaps
that isn’t her real name). Page talks about how so much of her daily schedule
is online activities, such as continually changing her social network status.
What is interesting is that she became so depressed when she lost her phone
that she essentially became a whore in order to purchase another one. “That’s
how much my phone means to me,” she says. Are we to believe that she is
representative of many teenagers in this extreme attitude?
The film gets off track again with its next subject, a
nineteen-year-old named Tobin. Tobin is addicted to playing video games, which
is quite a bit different from being online. And there is an interview with a
game designer about attempting to make the games as realistic as possible.
Again, that has nothing to do with how Facebook and Twitter are affecting how
children and teenagers interact with each other and with the real world.
The most endearing and personable of the film’s teen
subjects is Tom, a fifteen-year-old boy who has a boyfriend online that he
hasn’t met. He talks about coming out on Twitter, which is interesting. This is
where the film really seems to hit the mark, for this boy is exploring his
sexual identity online rather than in the real world. (By the way, near the end
of the film, they do meet.)
There is also some material on the origins of the
internet. And title cards provide some statistics, such as “40% of teenagers
spend more time with their friends online than in real life” and “90% of
the world’s data has been created in the last two years” (which is amazing)
and “2.5 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every day.”
Some of the statistics are questionable. For example, one title card tells us “We
look at our phone an average 150-200 times a day.” That sounds like an
alarming statistic until you factor in the fact that phones have replaced
watches as time devices. So how many of those 150-200 times are simply someone
checking the time? Also we are told: “What you choose to ‘like’ on Facebook
can be used to predict your sexuality with 88% certainty.” Again, that
sounds impressive, until you think about it. Less than ten percent of the
population is gay or bisexual. So if Facebook simply guessed “straight” for all
of its users, it would be correct at least 90% of the time.
Some of the information provided by adult interview subjects
is much more interesting than that provided by the teenagers. One professor,
for example, talks about how websites constantly run tests on their users to
determine what causes them to return to the sites. And the material regarding
privacy issues is certainly interesting, particularly about how the
commercially driven glorification of sharing everything on social networks
isn’t something most of the users really think about. And Professor Clifford
Nass (of Stanford University) has interesting things to say regarding how
people let Facebook and Amazon define them, how people can construct an
identity based on what the websites tell them about themselves. There is also
some unsettling footage of some sort of internet personality gathering. I’m not
sure what to make of it, especially as there is no narration or explanation of
what precisely it is, or how it came about.
The film doesn’t really provide solutions, but rather
gives a sort of overview of the potential problems of teenagers using the
internet constantly, and provides interviews with some key people. Clearly,
more needs to be done in this area, because it’s really about the future of
human interactions, as well as dealing with privacy issues and so on.
InRealLife was directed by Beeban Kidron, and is
scheduled to be released on DVD on December 2, 2014 through First Run Features.
The DVD contains no special features.
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