TEDxVictoria - Alexandra Samuel: Ten Reasons to Stop Apologizing for your Online Life

Alexandra Samuel argues that once we embrace our online lives as part of our real lives we will unlock the potential of the internet.
Alexandra Samuel is the Director of the Social + Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University, and the co-founder and principal of Social Signal, one of the world's most experienced social media agencies.

Filmed at TEDxVictoria on November 19 2011

http://tedxvictoria.com
http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/

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  Entertainment

[vansrcool1995]

A very good concept as we are often made to feel like we are time-wasting and not spending real life time with others online. I have just been away to the outback ( Broken Hill, Marree ,Lake Eyre , Birdsville, Bourke and it was often very hard to get online connection and I did miss my online community too and the real life community was great too. I think we need to acknowledge both real life offline and real life online and create a balance!

[shreequo]

thanks for an engaging and interesting talk...

[Brian Niedfeldt]

interestingly, wouldn't this be kind of a brilliant plan for censoring the internet, as well?

[Meghann Martinez]

Please add the option for captioning...thanks!

[spab2000]

Who are these people who are saying online life isn't real?

[Azundris]

Correct, but over 20 years late.

[SocialProgress]

Alex, thanks God at last someone stood up there & said it! As you know I now work with online social networks - why? Because I started to use social networks & found them to be both fascinating & helpful - in a time when I needed to connect with people and wasn't able to IRL (In Real Life). I've met some of the most wonderful people online - we 'connected', we engaged in conversation, we shared common interests online which led to meeting up IRL!

[TROOL Social Media]

I found this to be both interesting and eye-opening. Yes there is a difference between healthy and unhealthy that is not what Alexandra is talking about she is talking about integrating all we do under the heading #RealLifeToo Let's do this and do it with this talk in mind.. I choose not to apologize for my time online.. I choose to integrate my life.. all parts of it.. Thank You Alexandra its one step in the right direction.

[Tnoris23]

We should take our online activities serious as part of our whole life. But people who work in social media/the internet, have a big interest in convincing use that more time online is healthy. That is the important distinct healthy or unhealthy activity. Sometime it is healthy to realise that parts of what we do online is shallow, and at that point the answer is not alway to be more serious or committed online, but to get offline, where deeper more accountable relationships are possible.