Inferences

There are several observations that rise out of this examination of the literature. The first of which is that the technosocial space is a very real part of the universe that we inhabit, and that does not appear to be likely to change in the foreseeable future. This parallel dimension of action, interaction, and self-projection has a noticeable effect on those activity spheres by its very nature. If we want to successfully incorporate this new reality into the reality that we know, we must accept the reality of it, and attempt to understand the way that the different nature of these activity spheres differ from our accustomed reality, and adjust our collective paradigms accordingly. 

The first observation is that the technosocial space is real. Money that you spend here is really gone. The personas that you interact with are attached in a visceral way to real people, and your actions have a real impact both on the persona, and the real person behind it. Just because you cannot see the person you are interacting with, doesn't mean they don't exist (this is called object permanence, a skill you are supposed to pick up in the first year of life, but gets frequently tossed out the window when a shiny screen is injected into the situation). This is where a lot of the trouble in the technosocial space happens. Some people get angry when you remind them of the physical reality underlying their technosocial interactions. This could come across a number of ways, usually by shaming the offended party by asserting that whatever offense given should not offend, because it only happened on the internet, or "it's only fantasy football", or "hey, it's just a blog, relax" and the like. These diminish the alleged offense by attacking the other person's investment in the technosocial reality. 

From the first observation, we get the second: actions in the technosocial space have consequences in the physical reality. Lots of examples:

• A guy gets beheaded by his roommate for selling a digital sword.
• A player in an online game is offended by another player's in-game actions and responds by leaving a digital map to the offending player's real house in the game map.
• A college looks at a Facebook profile before deciding not to admit a student with photos of underage drinking all over it. 
• A girlfriend ends a relationship because she finds Facebook messages from another girl.
• The police arrest a fugitive because he checked in on Four Square.
• A man gets assaulted because someone posts (inaccurately) that he is a molester.
• A girl gets molested because she broadcasts exactly when she is regularly home alone with her phone off. 

The list could go on and on. The point is this: what you put on the internet is immediately accessible by ANYONE ELSE ONE THE INTERNET. There is no delete function in the technosocial space, just like life does not have a rewind button. The technosocial space offers the luxury of considering your input, and taking several drafts, a luxury few avail themselves of, but once you hit post it is in the space. A person who is skilled in the technosocial space can find anything you have ever posted.

Third, Technosocial personas are real projections of who you are, and afford the opportunity to be intentional in the construction thereof. In this regard, the technosocial space has been a great benefit to the self-actualization process. We are feeling more and more comfortable being who we want to be, as the internet provides peer affiliation groups for whatever common bond, or common antagonist, becomes the central force in the group. With that in mind, what you put out there is all people have to know you by, so be intentional in the construction of your avatar. 

The fourth observation is not drawn from the above literature, but while we are here we should make a note: there is no such thing as internet security.  Laws regulating technosocial interactions are unenforceable. This is just like life, so don't panic and stop using PayPal. The clerk at the grocery store could write down your credit card number, but that doesn't mean you are going to stop buying groceries. This has two noteworthy implications. The first of these is that you need to be very cautious with your passwords. There is no such thing as being entirely safe, but there is no reason to do the work for them. Think of your passwords as a digital extension of your car key, house key, and safety deposit box key all rolled together. You would not go around giving your keys to any random person who you met on the street. 

The biggest challenge for identity and financial and information thieves is not the theft itself; it is picking victims. To make it worth the search, it usually requires being sure that the payoff will be sizable, which protects most of us. Think of it like fishing. If you have a great hook, terrific pole, and a strong line, you still need to go find a big fish. You would not use the big gear on blue gill. In fact, blue gill are hardly worth the time it takes to catch them, so fishers will just drop a net and let them catch themselves. This is how most identity theft works. You are not worth targeting, but throwing a net and just taking what it catches is very low effort, making it worth the smaller individual value. So don't catch yourself. Don't click on links in emails. I don't care if it's from your wife, best friend, or shrink. It doesn't matter if you are on a Mac. The whole Macs-don't-get-viruses thing was only true for the brief period that the operating system was brand new and all those with a more fluid morality had not bothered rewriting their nets for the new system. They have taken the time, now. Also, you have not inherited £2.6 million, there was a plane crash but you won't get that money, and no one wants to pay you a million dollars to use your bank account to get their money to America. If you are concerned, copy either the name or the subject line and paste it into your search engine. Chances are good that you will see a number of spam-scam related sites. General rule about life that also applies to the technosocial reality: if it appears too good to be true, it is. 

Once we accept the reality of the technosocial space, the challenge of how to incorporate it into our physical life becomes significant. On the courtesy front, it is useful to consider your technosocial access point as a person, for physical reality interactions. For example, when your phone rings and you are in a conversation, it is like a person coming up and tapping you on the shoulder and asking for a minute of your time, while you are in the middle of the conversation. A text message while in class is a lot like whispering or passing notes to the person next to you. Some contexts are more amenable to that sort of thing than others. There are no hard and fast rules about when you should or shouldn't engage in the technosocial space, but consider the contexts above, and make decisions based on the specific situation. Be considerate. And the talk-to-text applications are getting really good. Stop texting while driving. You're killing us. 

This last bit is more a kind of advice than a observation: stop guessing. You think that your intuition about the state of reality is correct. This is almost never the case. Nearly everything that is known by humanity exists somewhere in the technosocial space. Correct yourself. The most valuable skill that you can develop in this future is the ability to find reliable information, and update your understanding of the world in light of that information. Wikipedia is not an authority, but it is a starting point. Online dictionaries do not have definitions, in the concrete sense that we want the word to carry. They have descriptions of a concept designed to point you toward the idea, not to entail every minute detail of the concept and a clearly delineated relationship between those details within the concept. You can not resolve disagreements by resorting to a dictionary. Sorry. Attached is a guide to how to get what you actually want out of Google. I would copy it into your phone and read through it when you are bored until you can search intuitively and effortlessly. Like every other habit or skill, you engrain it into your mind through repetition, so search, search often, and search well.  

As with all of life, the task of technosocial engagement is to hold tightly both to our personal, individual Strangeness, while engaging in our Relatedness. It is great to join groups, and find diverse people whose flow in the world fits with your own, but remember there is no possible group that could reflect the entirety of who and what you are, other than the group to which you already belong: the human species.