Three seconds into the first episode of Lain, a young woman commits suicide. Shortly thereafter, her classmates begin to receive emails from the deceased. The messages entail how she isn't dead, but rather she has abandoned her physical body. At the point she felt more comfortable with her digital self, she felt trapped in her fleshy form, and bitter at the time she spent between wired sessions. She decided that the wired, as they call it in the show, was more real than the physical world. While an extreme, this entire situation is rather unsettling.

Anyone with a decent amount of Internet usage knows about duality. The anonymity of the Internet is an intoxicating and fascinating concept. While it allows the user a freedom to transcend setting or situation, race or gender, it can also be used to avoid real life issues. This is understandable, as why would someone struggle against bad nerves, awkward social skills, and feelings of personal inadequacy if they didn't have to? The problem is that unlike real life, you are rarely pushed from the nest to learn to fly. As with Lain's title character, such minute differences manifests to the point that she begins to have clearly defined alternate identities. The confident, composed, and questioning Lain of the wired might as well be another person compared to the shy, introverted, bear pajama wearing "real" world counterpart. This manifestation of a distinct digital persona is the direct abandonment of her physical one. The growing divide is unknown to even her, until one of these fragments confronts her. A bitter, "evil" Lain, she uses her technological skill to lash out at others. Why? Because she can. Evil Lain exists because real Lain can not deal with others, and Lain of the wired exists because there are things she wishes to understand. The question arises that honestly, which of these "Lains" is the real one?

Much as Lain questions her own sense of reality, the development of technology makes the boundaries between these worlds grows paper thin. Given time, the carefree environment of the Internet gives way to playing games on the Internet, to voice chat, to meeting in real life. The viewer watches as both Lain and her computer evolve, as each gives way for the other to grow. Even personally, its odd to differentiate the friends I have met writing for this site, versus the friends I know in the physical world. The "wired," as it is, has all but destroyed the barriers that define traditional relationships. At one point I defined a "real" friend as one I could hang out with (go to dinner, watch a movie, play a board game). Time has tempered my definition as situations change and people move away from one another. The subtlety of how it all dawns on people is shocking. One day, a person just realizes that they spend more time talking to, relating to people they've never "met," than to the people whom are traditionally defined as friends.

Itunes, World of Warcraft, online gambling. The turn of the century is ripe with the ability to spend money on fully digital content. Not just a service charge, but a digital property, commodity. At this moment I can log onto Itunes a buy a song. For a certain sum, I've just acquired the legal rights to a highly complex pile of ones and zeroes. In Second Life, I can spend my real life money to buy and furnish an in game residence. To all of my game playing friends, I now posses something, to my non-gameplaying friends, I do not. What gets even more hazy is how my activities in a digital reality can affect my real world resources. The time I spend playing any number of popular MMO's could convert to monetary gain as I sell in game currency, leveled characters, ships, whatever. At this point I'm producing real income from within a pre-established reality, with its own set of physics and laws. Who's to say this line of behavior can't be considered a legitimate job? Once again, I have no real answers, only observations, and the curious belief that technology could very well be redefining the way we perceive reality.

Back on the subject of Lain, her life only continues to compound in complexity as titular character approaches her one friend Alice Mizuki. Alice befriend the shy, demure Lain of the real world, but consequently influences all of Lain's selves. When exposed to Lain of the wired, Alice is unable to comprehend how fundamentally different this person is to the one she knows. I won't ruin the plot, or how Lain deals with her own identity issues, but needless to say its depressing, and she ends up cold and indifferent. Fun, huh?