This broadly erroneous understanding of the relationship of people to the internet, along with an oversimplification of how it affects social movements, stems from a fallacy that has long been recognized scholars, and one that has been dubbed “digital dualism”—the idea that the internet is a less “real” world. Even the terms “cyberspace” and “virtual” betray this thinking, as if the internet constituted a separate space, like the digital reality in the movie Matrix that real people could plug into.
