[NON BLOG] Meeting People, or, Life Alongside the Virtual Archipelago

[rfmcdonald]

When I got home from work Thursday night, I'd planned to spend a fairly quiet night inside, tackling some critical tasks: blogging, resume work, household duties. I'd plotted a schedule out in some detail, tapering off to inactivity and the sleep of the deserving sometime after midnight. It's a good thing, then, that schillerium phoned me with the happy news that halibut was in town, since otherwise I might have gotten some work done. Fun is rather preferable to work.

I enjoyed meeting roosterbear this September just past--I don't want there to be any confusion about that. I have to say, though, that I'm happy that in meeting halibut rather less eventful. Streetcar east, disembarkment at John, walking south to the Chapters, going to the in-store Starbucks and waiting only briefly before a host of people appeared: schillerium and halibut, and also N. from San Francisco, and green_onion from Toronto. Great fun was had over the entire evening, fajitas at the Armadillo Texas Grill, walking around Toronto (eternal flame of hate, remember), milkshakes at Fran's Restaurant, and a variety of arcane and interesting convesation topics including soc.motss' Bulgarian controversy, the global AIDS epidemic, fiscal federalism in Canada and South Africa, various soc.bi personalities, and the evolution of computer technology and computer networking over time. (50 megabytes never seemed so expensive to me. We split up at a quarter after one outside of Fran's.

I haven't been very active on soc.motss or soc.bi in the past couple of years. This isn't because I don't value these groups, since I do. Quite frankly, if not for the ability to make my first twitchy-minded post on soc.bi back in February of 2002, I'm not altogether sure what would have happened. I'm not altogether sure that I want to know, though given the paucity of any support on PEI and my isolation generally I think that the more positive outcomes can be excluded as a matter of course. USENET has played a critical role in my life; it isn't inaccurate to say that everything that I'm doing now and everyone that I know and consider a friend can be traced, one way or another, back to USENET. Even blogging: My interest in Livejournal was sparked by vcutag's example and roosterbear kind gift of a startup code back in 2003 when those startup codes were needed.

Last September, I linked to a study that claimed people with active online social lives tended to have problems with real-life social interactions. That analysis was flawed, of course, not considering the possibility that online social lives might serve at the very least as a useful substitute for actual social contact for those people who couldn't handle it, more frequently as a way to facilitate real-life social interactions. I actually did have a real-life conversation on this subject James B. (known via soc.history.what-if) one fine afternoon that was interrupted by a (missed) transatlantic phone call from sandor_baci (known via John Kusch's weblog). Without online networks, I certainly wouldn't have had fun Thursday evening with a friend from Cape Town.

So. It was wonderful to meet halibut and the others. Perhaps next time in Cape Town (or San Francisco, or another world city)?