Anthropology 295: Anthropology of Media

In thinking about virtual relationships versus real life ones I went back to our dear old friend Facebook. On Facebook there is this application where one can play the game of Scrabble. It is addictive. I was sitting around my house the other day with some friends and realized that I was currently engaged in scrabble games with them on Facebook. Yet what I found to be humorous was the fact that at that very moment in that very room was the actual board game of Scrabble and we were not playing it. I was in an actual room, with actual people that I was playing virtual Scrabble with, yet when the actual opportunity arose to play Scrabble in real life, we opted out. I found this to be interesting. We actually started joking around about it, but the question arose in my mind as to why? Why didn’t we just play? Was it because it is easier online because the dictionaries and word verifiers were there one hand? Yet I realized that while both online and real life Scrabble were the same game, they had there differences. In “real life” scrabble you are there in the moment. It is more intense in that you must make your decisions in a timely manner. Also when I play with my friends we don’t allow the use of dictionaries, unless you are looking up a word that you already have and want to double check on it. Virtual Scrabble is more leisurely in that one can play at when it is more convenient for one to do so. You can pick it up and stop whenever you want to. You are more apt to get “better” words because you have more time and more resources so you end up looking better or smarter in the end.
It might mean nothing the fact that currently my friends and I prefer online to real life. It might just be a fad. Or it might be a reflection of where things are going.