By Andrew Miller in Reader
Posted in Social Media on January 29, 2009 at 11:50 pm
In 2001, I went to San Francisco to stay with a guy I met through the internet and had spoken to on the phone only once. Looking back on it now, it sounds a little crazy. I nearly got turned away at the border because I didn’t know his address – only that he was meeting me at the airport.
I could have become one of those stories you hear about in the news – scary thought. Instead, I spent a wonderful month in America, putting on a stone in weight, fiddling with computers, enjoying the sunshine and then driving to Seattle in a 1973 RV that was falling apart, to meet more people that I knew through the internet along the way.
Fast forward 8 years to a bar in SOHO, and I’m at a meet up for UK technology journalists and PR’s called “KNOT”, organised by Andrew Lim. Several hundred people turned up and he raised over £1000 for charity. The entire event was organised through Facebook and Twitter. Many people didn’t know each other. I met people that I’d only ever had conversations with over Twitter.
On the same note, online dating is no longer seen as a taboo – but rather just another social network where everyone has the same obvious motive. Relationships are formed and maintained entirely in text and people think nothing of it. The idea of meeting someone through the internet has almost become, dare I say, normal.
Twitter, Skype, Facebook - there really has never been a better time to be social in every medium. I wonder if I told people I was going to America to meet someone I met from the internet now, I’d get the looks I got in 2001? And would border control kick up such as fuss? I don’t think they’d care what I was doing as long as they had my finger prints 
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Loading ...Comment by Nick Clayton - January 30, 2009 on 12:36 pm
It wasn’t until I read your post that it struck me how normal it has become to meet virtual friends in the flesh. I had a similar first experience to you, meeting up with people in New York I only knew through CompuServe. I was there with my wife on Hoover tickets (remember them?) and she took a lot of persuading to come along to a strange mid town bar for lunch.
I think she was surprised at how normal all but one of them were. And the exception was entertaining rather than dangerous. (He wore a garish Hawaiian shirt to try and disguise his eating disorder. A large amount of his food never quite reached his mouth, although enough did for him to fill his XL shirt.)
Today the only thing that would seem odd about such a meeting was that it was through CompuServe.
Comment by - February 2, 2009 on 12:50 pm
I too recently met up with freinds I had got to know on a writing forum. We had an excellent day in London - it was like we’d known each other for ages instead of for less than a year.
Trackback by - February 9, 2012 on 4:48 am
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