More Real than You

What do people mean when they say: "In Real Life"? What is real? Hegelian philosophy proposes that we only know that we are real because we are perceived through the eyes of others. Hence why we get annoyed when we are ignored and excited when our social media gets attention. George Berkeley put forward the idea that for something to be real, it needs to be within the consciousness of a mind. In this piece, I've taken an image of Ed from a fairly popular 90s cartoon show. More people today are aware of Ed than they are of the average human. Ed exists in the minds of millions of millennials whereas most of us are only in the minds of a few thousand. Thus if we were to transform the measure of reality from a binary scale to a spectrum, we could argue that Ed, based on certain philosophers' theories, is more real than you. Unconsciously this could be the reason why many of us take selfies and upload them online, it isn't because we are vain, its because broadcasting our image in the virtual world is one way to become more real.