The Escape

In online contexts, however, it is easy to escape such a gaze. Such escape is not always a bad thing: sometimes it might well be beneficent and fully justified, as when we focus on our mobile devices while commuting, etc. Rather, Vallor is raising the larger question: what sorts of habits and excellences are we likely to acquire as such online environments become our predominant venues for communication with one another?

Again, acquiring such virtues is difficult at the beginning – especially, it would seem, for a young person both as a beginner in these virtues and as someone whose communicative engagements increasingly take place in online rather than offline environments. That is: if we are at the beginning stages of learning to acquire such virtues – precisely because it is challenging and difficult to do so – it is especially tempting to quit as soon as possible. (By analogy: think about how young people fight against the sorts of practice required to become competent musicians or athletes, much less excellent ones, for example.) If the vast majority of our communicative engagements with one another take place primarily in online contexts, are we likely to acquire and foster the virtues of perseverance and patience? And/or is it more likely that, when we are forced in offline contexts to take up the difficult practices of patience and perseverance, we will rather seek to return as quickly as possible to the relative familiarity of the comparatively less demanding online environments?