The AV Club recently ran this piece on Tumblr, specifically on how it relates to the in-the-moment nature of pop music, as well as concerns (expressed most notably by Drake) that it limits innovation and expression in favor of circulating the original work of others divorced from context.  

The article is interesting enough in that regard, but I’m more engaged by the last couple of paragraphs, elaborating on an earlier quote about the distinction between “URL or IRL.”  Especially as it relates to me.

I have, after all, lived a long, relatively eventful internet life, which has become more and more inextricably linked with my IRL existence over time.  Frankie Thirteen began as a screen name, the latest of a series of internet identities that I once changed with clockwork regularity.  Over ten years later, the name has come to encompass more.  I dare say the “point of no return” was when I started playing competitive rock paper scissors, using my screen name as an actual nickname.

Granted, Frankie isn’t the only name I’ve been known to use in certain corners of the internet, but no matter the name, the merging continues—the people on the other end of the screen become so much more than that, to the point that aspects of my life that I once took pains to keep separate have crossed over—and I simply don’t care so much.  The URL and IRL are no longer distinct in my case; I have always found it reductive to look at them as separate pieces of the whole, but now I’ve sacrificed the comfort of leaving one behind for the other for just a little while.

“But the idea that living a post-Internet life means choosing between URL and IRL … or combining the two worlds and not being able or wanting to separate yourself from your online persona, is limiting.”

This just makes it sound like you can’t have it any way at all.  So then, what is the point of living a “post-Internet life”?