You don’t lose reality by communicating at a distance. You don’t become a “virtual” person. I wrote about this a year ago, but the silliness hasn’t abated, so I want to make the point again.

An online gathering of people can appropriately be called a “virtual” gathering. They aren’t really coming together; they get the effect of it through technology. The people participating, though, remain real. You’d think that after over a century of telephones, everyone would grasp that people can be real without being in the same room.

It gets worse. Flexjobs claims that work from a home office is merely “virtual” work. Some of the people who do it are hired by “virtual companies.” I’m not sure whether they get virtual payment for their work instead of real money. Other sites claim you can have a “virtual workforce”.

They might answer, “Hey, when we say ‘virtual,’ we don’t mean virtual. We just mean ‘online.'” But when people systematically use a dismissive word, you have to ask why. It gives the impression that doing something online is a mere imitation of what they’d be doing when physically present in the office. That “virtual work” isn’t real work, a “virtual workforce” isn’t really working, that “virtual workers” aren’t real people. It’s like “French leave” or “Indian giver,” though without the ethnic insult.

One of the few positive effects of the COVID pandemic has been the discovery that being physically present isn’t necessary to do a lot of jobs. Many tasks do require being on the spot; until there are robots for everything, you can’t put up a building or repair a pipe remotely. But a lot of managers feel insecure about what employees are doing when they’re out of sight. They want to get back to a “real” workplace, so they dismiss remote work as “virtual.”

This is important to writers in two ways. First, we can usually do our work from anywhere, so we’re especially prone to be dismissed as “virtual.” Second, we’re guardians against the misuse of words. It becomes easy call remote work “virtual” when we constantly see it dismissed that way. Let’s not help to dig the trap.