Being Here and Here

Last night I hooked up with some Richmond writers through a MeetUp. MeetUp has hit the mainstream, finally. I knew it had when my younger sister asked me last fall if the site was okay. Although I had no personal experience at that time, I had heard friends discuss earlier in the year how they were going to use it to start a MeetUp.

Last summer I played around with the idea of starting my own tea shop, mostly because the only real bubble tea shop around here closed suddenly. I still miss them. While I was doing research I discovered what I wanted to start was already here (mostly) as Cafe Gutenberg (even though they don't have bubble tea). I dropped in on the Objectivists Group which meets there. They decided that MeetUp would be a good way to publish events and get the word out about being logical. (heh) So, I had to get involved in MeetUp. I joined five groups right away.

All this is my verbose way of saying that the next big thing is here already. Websites that bring two worlds (meat and cyber space) together. Which is probably the real reason MySpace and YouTube exploded. MeetUp does that. NaNoWriMo does that. But they also let me keep in touch (or in sight) of those who aren't able to turn up in meat space.

I've watched my own personal cyber presence cross the barrier into meat space at an excruciatingly slow pace since 1996. Back in the day when I got 3 visitors a week there was no point talking in meat space about what I was doing in cyber space. No one had a clue. At yesterday evening's MeetUp, there was not only understanding of what a website is but demands for the address, summaries of what I offer and promises to visit. It's not unusual for conversations like that to result in real visits to my site and sometimes real feedback; as opposed to even two years ago when promises would be made and not kept.

I've loosely tracked DQ and MKWM (and their ilk) as they put together a nifty community that links cyber and meat space in a happy and useful way. In the 90's my extended family (which runs to Germany and at one point the United Arab Emirates and Guam) had an AOL Group which did the same sort of thing – but not really because we were all still wholly committed to face-to-face interactions. The group was just a stop gap ersatz temporary bridge to that. I suppose not fully engaging in the interchange of the two spaces had something to do with learning the language of cyberspace and how to translate everything that face-to-face (or voice-to-voice) offers into an online presence.

Apparently we've got there at last. I feel like planting a flag.

In other news, Blogger logged me in automatically when I browsed to their home page. I guess I may have actually asked them to do that. Next time I visit the home page I'll have to check my prefs. Scary though, since I know my ISP does the old random IP thing. But good, too. I'm clearly of two minds about being identified wherever I go. I'm attached to my anonymity.