BRENTWOOD, CALIFORNIA—This morning I walked my dog Jesus to a beautiful lush lawn to pee. Her delicate quarter-sized paws prefer dry soft ground and her nose craves living grass after an enduring Toronto winter.

But instead of sniffing around eagerly for the right spot to relieve herself, she broke her pattern and did a very strange thing. She rolled down and onto her back, like she does on the carpet at home. I urged her on to no avail. Kneeling down to pick her up my fingers brushed the grass and I realized what was wrong.

The huge lovely “lawn” was in fact, extremely realistic AstroTurf.

Not the Home Hardware cheapo-turf of my youth that I used to carpet my oh-so-hipster warehouse space because it complemented so well my blood-soaked abortion murals. No. This was turf that fooled non-desert-dwelling organized-sport-ignorant me until I touched it. They’d even cut out natural-looking holes for the citrus trees!

I’m obsessed with marking these moments in meatspace. Changes in “real” world environments and social interactions are often lamented by luddites fearing the loss of human interaction. This kind of thinking is ahistorical and wrong.

My physical-world conversations and environments are full of interactions that appear entirely authentic until I get up close. Daily greetings with neighbours and tenants, small jokes about the weather with peers or tertiary-sector workers and, right here underneath meatspace-me, a tufted monofilament lawn. Even the more detailed updates with co-workers and distant relatives reveal no substantive depth. None of these people add unique value to my life beyond the comfort and necessity of social belonging. All of which many of my online friends provide more conveniently and regularly. I just turn on Twitter and iChat. They are there whenever I want or gone when I don’t feel like it. My dreary, retired and nosy neighbours can ambush me anytime I’m working in my yard. The meaningful relationships in my life are not bounded by any false dichotomies of real and virtual.

In no way am I arguing for the supremacy of socializing online. I see it in a continuum with all social interaction. It has not revolutionized my life and created entirely new ways of being for me. But it has given me a wider variety of resources for human interaction leading to different kinds of conversations. The value of the relationships I have on Twitter or Twine with people I will never be physically near to are not less or more authentic than the luddites I orbit on a regular basis.

The distinction between meatspace and online creates tensions that need not exist—and masks issues of class which are the true organizers of social interaction both off- and online. Access to canonized literature and Internet communication technologies are all entirely bounded by cultural capital and economic means. A debate among elites is a great time-waster for maintaining the status quo, but it is also inherently evil for all its misspent energies.

Like those who refused to use the newfangled automobile or telephone or television, the e-luddite position will become moot. Culture is change. Tools for social regulation and interaction develop alongside culture’s dynamism. Utopia is not ever realized nor is it going to be doomsday for civilization. We’re all just caught up in the ceaseless plodding along over thicker more irregular AstroTurfs to the tune of unpredictable yet cohesive social modulations.