With the shift from in-person to Zoom over the past months, I’ve been wondering how much we’re changing not just our activities but our intuitions and even language.

It might be helpful to turn to those who have the fewest preconceived notions, and for whom life under COVID comprises a very high percentage of their conscious experience – kids!

My three year old and I have developed this daily ritual, where she says “I wanna watch rainbow baby shark” (the song/video) and I start singing the song, and she says “No! On the phone!” and I put my ear on the phone and she says “No! For *real*!”

That reminded me of a previous conversation with her, which went roughly as follows:

Me: “A, you have a Zoom with your class today!”
A (3 years old): “A real Zoom or a fake Zoom?”
Me: “A real Zoom. What is a fake Zoom?”
A: “Where you go on a computer and pretend to be on Zoom.”

In these interactions, my daughter is making very clear that she rejects the privileging of in-person, or what we call “real” experience, over Zoom or even watching YouTube videos.

The draw of a screen w/ hi-res graphics & constant, spirited engagement, to her, might feel just as real if not more real than in-person interaction. This, of course, is the allure of the screen so many children are drawn to. (We limit our kids to 2-3 hrs of Zoom+YouTube a day.)

Which leads to the deeper question philosophers have been discussing for centuries and millennia – what is “real”? How do I know that the phenomena I experience are “real,” any more than a dream or some Matrix-like universe? Is art an imitation of reality, or the reverse?

While our intuitions may clearly perceive the physical world as real and the digital world as virtual and somehow less so, there is no reason to assume that the intuitions of our children, and certainly grandchildren, will remain consistent with that view.

This emergent shift, or maybe it’s a revolution, has ramifications at so many levels – experiential, halakhic, philosophical, and much more. We’re going to need to have the time and space to reflect on these developments more fully.

But for now, it’s enough to note that things as basic as our experience of reality are clearly in flux.

Good luck to us all!