‘We, the Web Kids’ vs. ‘The IRL Fetish’

“The IRL Fetish”:

Every other time I go out to eat with a group, be it family, friends, or acquaintances of whatever age, conversation routinely plunges into a discussion of when it is appropriate to pull out a phone. People boast about their self-control over not checking their device, and the table usually reaches a self-congratulatory consensus that we should all just keep it in our pants.

You have never been more conscious of your offline life in your entire offline life.

But “We, the Web Kids”:

The ability to find information is to us something as basic as the ability to find a railway station or a post office in an unknown city is to you. When we want to know something… [w]e know that we are going to find the information we need in a lot of places…. Should we need the details, we can look them up within seconds.

Online life is a variant, form, or flavour of offline life.