Sherlock Holmes and other real people

By Alexander Lindsay

March 2008

Time for a reality check, folks. I have long suspected that the digital age has blurred our ability to tell the real from the unreal, so that we’re in danger of stumbling into a never-never land, slipping down the rabbit hole to join Alice and her weird cohorts in Wonderland.

It used to be quite clear-cut: I think, therefore I am. Now it has to be: I’m on Facebook, therefore I am. Whether you exist or not depends on how much digital information there is about you.

I’ve been looking at an astonishing survey in which people in the UK were given famous characters and asked to state whether they were real or fictional.

A quarter of them thought that Winston Churchill never really existed – despite the fact that another national poll named him as the greatest Englishman of all time.

Mahatma Gandhi? He too was just a fictional character created for a movie, according to a quarter of them.

Others thought Sherlock Holmes was a true character, just like the heroic World War II fighter pilot Biggles, and the Three Musketeers and Robin Hood just had to be genuine because they made movies about them.

But other household names consigned to unreality included Cleopatra, The Duke of Wellington, Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale and Sir Walter Raleigh, all of whom were thought to be fictional.

“This suggests a complete lack of common sense and respect for our greatest heroes of the past,” fumed one historian. “Something must be completely lacking in our education that people should be so ignorant as to think these people never actually existed.

“No doubt these other ones, like Robin Hood, people mistake as being real because they have recently been featured on TV.

“It’s all about celebrities and popular culture.”

But can we even be sure our celebrities are real, and not just some trick of virtual reality? Does Lindsay Lohan really exist? Is Paris Hilton real? For that matter, is the Basingstoke Travelodge real?

Maybe, as some philosophers believe, our whole life is but a dream. The universe is a dream. That chocolate brownie and café latte you had at lunch was a dream. The movie you saw last night and enjoyed so much was a dream. And, with a bit of luck, so was the credit card statement that dropped in the mail this morning.

Now, of course, you can take charge of the dream and alter it, thanks to the wonder of virtual reality and Second Life. There are an estimated seven million Second Lifers living proxy lives as we speak, whizzing through cyberspace and existing as beautiful people in exotic places, when in reality they are fat, balding, dysfunctional dreamers in one-horse towns.

The Second Life website gives you the chance to design a new self, to become the person of your dreams. When you subscribe you are given the tools to create an avatar which is a digital self portrait, using a selection of male or female body templates. You can even change sex, creating your alter ego as a man or a woman.

Significantly, a large chunk of the male avatars look like Ken, the friend of Barbie, and the women look like Lara Croft from Tomb Raiders.

In this new existence, you are not limited to humans either. You can elect to be an animal. Or even a chair, which I guess is marginally more interesting than being Ken from Barbie.

One thing the avatars never are is old. Not many of them wear glasses. They have relationships with other avatars they meet, can fall in love, out of love, get married, get divorced, have fights and have romantic dinners.

You have to pinch yourself to remember that this cyber life is not real. And that’s the danger.

Second life is really the logical extension of the imaginary friend. And now, even your imaginary friend can be traded on the internet. A woman in the north of England put her imaginary friend up for sale on eBay. The friend, called Liffy, had a green face, brown hat and walked with a stick.

“I acquired him as a small child and owned him for several years,” said the seller, called Laura. “However, I have an extensive collection of imaginary friends and cannot give Liffy the love and attention he needs.”

The starting bid was £10. I haven’t as yet been able to establish if any fool actually bought Liffy.
Truly, you can do anything you want once you divorce yourself from reality. Take Cheatneutral, for example…

You’ve heard of carbon neutral, well Cheatneutral is the equivalent for love cheats. Just as you have a carbon footprint, you also have a cheat footprint. If you are an adulterer or a wayward boyfriend, that is. And just as we have carbon offset schemes, it didn’t take a quantum leap of the imagination to say: “Why not have a cheat offset scheme where you can trade off your indiscretions?”

So check out , where for the equivalent of $5 you can sell your guilt to the website, which then invests the money in loving, faithful couples.

“We simply invest the money you give us in monogamous, faithful or just plain single people – to encourage them to stay that way,” says the site.

Call me an old cynic, but I wonder just who these monogamous, faithful, plain single people might be…

Even our academics fall prey to the loss of reality. I remember when the film of The Lord of the Rings came out, I opened a newspaper and found the headline: “Gollum had personality disorder, say medics.”

Really? In my book Gollum was a twisted, deranged, murderous, misshapen monster. To say he had a personality disorder was a bit like describing Attila the Hun as “disagreeable.”

But this statement of the obvious appeared in no less an austere publication than the British Medical Journal. A research team at University College London concluded: “Gollum fulfils seven of the nine criteria for schizoid personality disorder.”

In the end they ruled out schizophrenia because, said the team, it was not in keeping with Gollum’s culture.

Can you believe they’re talking about a fictional character here?

I rather suspect that Gollum’s problems derive more likely from being created by someone with an incredible imagination and a love of fantasy. A guy called JRR Tolkien.

Their parting shot was that Gollum also suffered a thyroid problem – hence the bulging eyes and weight loss.

No doubt we can look forward to their next world-shattering revelation. Probably along the lines of “Dumbo the Elephant was anorexic.”

I feel very worried about the way reality is slowly slipping out of our collective grasp.

But there is no reason to let it worry you. After all, this whole column could just be a figment of your imagination.