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In watching the flow of events over the past two weeks or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened regarding our culture and its connection to what we used to call reality.

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Consider these recent events: bystanders recording the killing of Alton Sterling by Baton Rouge, La., police; the Facebook Live video streamed by Philando Castile’s girlfriend moments after he was shot by Minneapolis police; Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s use of FaceTime to rally his supporters into the streets during the attempted coup; the out-of-nowhere success of Pokemon Go that has resulted in crowds of civilians wandering the streets, stumbling into dead bodies and even to their deaths.

It is hard to escape the sense that something larger is at work, something that pulls together and makes sense of these disparate events. What that is, is the rejection of the idea of “reality,” understood as the assumption that where and when people are is the most important fact about them when it comes to shaping their social behaviour, political beliefs and cultural values.

The where and the when of existence — that is, the fact that people occupy a specific place in spacetime — has, of course, been of overriding importance for all human history. But it seems that is no longer the case. It has been supplanted by a mode of existence that is mobile, networked and virtual.