The Illusion of Digital Presence: Why 'Being Online' Doesn't Mean Being There
How we mistook being reachable for being real.
The Illusion of Digital Presence: Why "Being Online" Doesn't Mean Being There
How we mistook being reachable for being real.
My friend texted me from a concert the other week. "This is amazing!!!" she wrote, followed by a shaky video of some indistinguishable performers on a distant stage. Later, scrolling through her Instagram, I noticed dozens of Stories from the same event—each carefully framed, filtered, and hashtagged.
When I asked her about the show the next day, she seemed oddly disconnected. "It was good," she said vaguely. "I think I posted most of it."
She'd been physically present at the concert. But she wasn't really there.
Just like I’m not really at my cousin’s wedding when I’m tracking the Uber to take me there while liking my ex’s vacation photos from 2019. It’s basic physics.
The Great Presence Deception
We believe we're more connected than any humans in history. Our devices keep us perpetually tethered to everyone we know—friends, family, colleagues, exes we haven't spoken to in years but somehow still follow online because emotional closure is apparently less important than seeing if they’ve redone their kitchen.
But connection isn't presence. It's proximity dressed as intimacy. The digital equivalent of standing back-to-back and convincing yourself you're making eye contact.
What we've created isn't togetherness—it's its visual twin. A presence proxy.
Like sending a cardboard cutout of yourself to your own funeral. Everyone sees you there. You just miss the good parts.
This wasn’t a cultural accident. It was engineered.
Platforms don’t monetize depth. They monetize drift.
They don't want you fully engaged in one moment—they want you partially engaged in many. A buffet of attention slices, none of them satisfying.
We think we're more present than ever. In reality, we've become ambient. Always on, never in.
Like a refrigerator light that thinks it’s the sun.
Available ≠ Present
There used to be a difference between being reachable and being there. We’ve collapsed it with the enthusiasm of someone who thinks “fold” and “crumple” mean the same thing.
Consider the modern dinner:
Four friends sit together. Three are checking notifications. One is taking a photo of the meal. Their bodies share a location, but their attention—their presence—is dispersed across timelines.
It's a séance where everyone’s trying to contact the dead while ignoring the living.
They are available. But they are not with each other. Not really.
They’re just documenting a meal they’re not actually tasting.
We are surrounded by bodies. Haunted by minds.
It’s a zombie apocalypse with better skincare.
Schrödinger's Conversation
Digital interactions now exist in quantum states: every conversation is simultaneously happening and suspended. Begun and not begun.
Like Red Light, Green Light, but the light is a typing bubble.
When your partner texts, "We need to talk," the conversation exists—but only partially. No real exchange has occurred. The tension is active, but unprocessed.
You’ve just entered relationship purgatory, minus the clarity of knowing what you did wrong.
This is the dominant state of modern communication: liminal, unresolved, ambient.
Even in person, attention disappears mid-sentence. A glance at a phone. A subtle shift.
The conversation doesn't end. It just... enters buffering.
Like your Netflix on a weak connection, but with worse consequences.
It’s not multitasking. It’s multi-absenting. The productivity hack no one asked for, but everyone’s perfecting.
Notifications Are Not Connection
Remember when "being with" someone meant looking them in the eye?
Now it means seeing their typing bubble. Progress.
You viewed my Story. I saw your location. You liked my post. We’re connected, right?
In the same way binoculars count as conversation.
This isn’t intimacy. It’s ambient surveillance, wrapped in emoji. The NSA, but make it cute.
We don’t spend time with people. We monitor them. And we’ve trained ourselves to mistake that monitoring for care. For contact. For closeness.
We’re not connecting. We’re checking.
Like airport security, but with less warmth.
Perpetual Partial Attention: The New Virtue
We’ve normalized fractured attention. We’ve rebranded it as productivity.
You’re not unavailable—you’re unlocatable.
Never fully anywhere, always fractionally everywhere.
We celebrate this as multitasking. Responsiveness. Dedication.
But being split isn’t being present. It’s being fragmented. And fragments don’t connect—they scatter.
Digital Ghosts in the Machine
We’ve become digital ghosts: flickering across platforms, showing up without arriving, responding without being.
Ghosts:
Appear in many places at once
Leave traces without substance
Disappear without warning
Simulate presence without presence
So do we.
And so do our relationships. Ghost relationships.
Recognizable in shape. Empty in feeling.
We’re not connecting. We’re haunting.
The Attention Transaction
Every platform offers the same deal:
Simulated connection, in exchange for your divided attention.
But attention is zero-sum.
Every moment of ambient presence is a moment lost to actual presence.
This isn’t a glitch. It’s the product design.
Platforms profit from breadth, not depth. From visibility, not intimacy.
Focus doesn’t scale.
Friction doesn’t convert.
So we’re sold a new virtue: accessibility over presence.
And we buy it, even as it costs us the thing we thought we were getting.
A More Honest Taxonomy
This isn’t a call to abandon digital life.
It’s a call to stop mislabeling it.
Let’s build a better language for being. A taxonomy of attention:
True presence: Undivided attention in shared context
Physical proximity: Together, but mentally elsewhere
Focused digital connection: Apart, but attuned
Simulated presence: Available, but absent
Not all connection is equal. Naming the difference might be the first step back.
The Choice
Every ping is a fork in the road: respond or remain.
Every glance at your screen is a vote for what matters.
Every divided moment is a decision—whether or not you realize you're making it.
Ghosts don’t know they’re ghosts.
But if you’re reading this, you’re not gone yet.
Leave a comment. Or don't.
I'd like your thoughts on this piece.
You could write something thoughtful. Maybe even put your phone in another room while you do it.
Or just tap the like button during your next Zoom call. Send an emoji. Bookmark for later. Share without reading.
The algorithm can't tell the difference. It sees engagement where humans see gestures.
I'll be here for whatever you decide. Partially.
Thanks for reading Opinions & Conditions May Apply—essays at the intersection of language, technology, and systemic dysfunction.
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So this piece is pretty brilliant, as the other commenter on this essay has correctly noted. Not really sure what that guy's deal is or whatever, but he's onto something.
I'm curious, though - in lieu of simply re-labeling the nuances and distinctions between different forms of presence and connection, do you think it's even possible to build a platform that promotes and emphasizes "true presence" (as you define it) within the digital landscape? Or is it simply something that digital/social media can only ever produce a kind of vague facsimile of? I do wonder sometimes how our social media platforms would have been conceived and would have evolved if they had been built through a more humanistic lens.
This resonates with anyone who lifts their head up and gazes around.