It's hard to see what In Real Life is trying to do. Exploring the perils of the Internet with regards to bullying, addiction, social networking , exposing of porn to underage children, and the funnelling of all our private data to businesses looking to flog us things we don't need, In Real Life (or InRealLife) amounts to nothing but more than scaremongering.
Beebon Kedron's documentary starts out sprightly enough with two fifteen-year-old boys only too happy to show Kedron the free porn they look up, taking us through the various acronyms and what they mean. Kedron seems to nudge them into sound bites, like admitting that when they look at a girl in real life, all they see is porn, and the challenge is to get the girl to do the things they saw women do online, record it, and then dump her because she's a "slag." Ryan and Ben feel this is sad, though – shaking their heads at it all but it's hard to believe their sincerity. One girl is prepared to prostitute herself to buy a phone, and recounts at length the sexual things she had to perform to retrieve her BlackBerry stolen by two boys.
Then Kedron, who comes across as someone who is just discovering all this and is appalled by it all (they spend three hours online?????), branches out into Facebook's privacy issues, Google and other company's storing of our data, before being shocked at the hours one kid spends on his Xbox. There is the cult of YouTube celebrities and 'facts' like '40% of teens spend more time with their friends online than in real life' but these aren't backed up by anyone. There is a comparison between being online for hours on end and drug addiction but Kedron can't really make the evaluation stick.
While there are perils of the Internet, and what children are exposed to should be limited, In Real Life comes across like an old fogey shaking its head at the yoof of today with the same level of distrust that was directed at TV, miniskirts, hippies, punks, video nasties, and Slipknot.
The Internet might be bad, mkay. but Beebon Kedron (Bridget Jones: Edge Of Reason) even balks on that message, ending with a sweeter-than-sweet scene where two gay teens finally meet face to face after being in an online relationship for ages. So what exactly are we supposed to take from this then?
