A Different World Online

The Internet is a strange place.  You get to see and experience things that you would otherwise never do.  You also get to meet people who likewise you would never have met otherwise.  In this context I define 'meet' as either online or offline, it doesn't have to be one or the other it can be either or both.

I'm 27 and by my age my parents had got married, had their first child and bought their first house, that was a different time though, and a different world.  While some of the things they did like that illude me and many in my generation, there are many things we have and that we do now that they did not.  For one not just online but offline too we are more mobile.  It does not break the bank to fly to another country anymore, while the level of comfort you want to live in might, the opportunity is there and with the likes of couch surfing you can visit another country and stay with someone for free, all it will cost is the travel.

In terms of connectivity many people say we are anti-social now and that we don't talk to each other anymore.  I don't think that's true, I think we talk to one another more than we did - it's just less likely that the people we talk to will actually be physically close to us.  The Internet is a barrier that many embrace, it allows you to open up to some people more than you would because you think they are on the other side of the world and you'll likely never meet them face to face so you can be as honest as you want, there'll be less consequence.  Whereas the people that live around us are there and they likely will be for some time, so we don't want to damage what little relations we have with them.

I embraced the Internet in this way as a young gay man.  I lived in a very socially conservative atmosphere, where there was a paralysing fear of anyone ever finding out I was gay.  I did tell a few people but they were very few in number and only ever guys who I was convinced were gay too, or who outed themselves to me first.  The Internet connected me with like-minded people and showed me that I was not alone.  While that desire to reach out for people to connect with was originally driven by my sexuality it is not guided by it alone anymore.  Now when I reach out it is to form connections with people who share my interests in other areas.  There is the expectation that the people around you won't be interested in the same things you are, mainly caused by their lack of expression of interest in them.

If you like something a lot and you don't know anyone else that does, the first place you're likely to go is the internet.  Social media where you like, favourite, share, and comment on the things you have an interest in, forums if you can find them, blogs if you are a reader, even running one of your own if you are a writer [*waves hand* hi] - to that end you do meet people online who share your interests and you don't have to feel shame in what you like.

I have met many people online over the years, each for various different things.  When I wanted to learn Spanish I posted an ad looking for a tutor who'd be willing to teach me for free and I got the response I was looking for and spent months chatting to different guys one from Argentina, one from Brasil, and one surprisingly, from Germany.  It helped me improve my Spanish but not to the level I had wanted as we inevitably ended up talking about other things and found out we shared a lot of other interests, the professional capacity we had met in turned to friendship.  They were people I would never have met.  I would never have travelled to any of those countries and even if I had the chance we would have met would have been slim.  In fact one of them lived in London for a year while I was there at University - years before we met online.  So we lived in the same city for a time completely unaware of one another's existence.

We live on a much more global scale, and with that the pool of people we can connect with expands from our small communities we live in to the world as a whole - or at least the world with Internet.  The list of countries I have met people online from and got to know has grown.  Those I can remember are listed at the end of this post.  The point of this post is to encourage people to be more social online.  Social networking has the capacity to connect people, some sites like facebook were a lot better at that in their early days, they are less social today and have become more anti-social.  That's one of the things I like about twitter, it's still quite open and you can still engage with people you've never met before and find you have a connection.

The people I have met and got to know have been from:

United Kingdom, Ireland, Argentina, Australia, Brasil, Canada, China, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Spain, The Netherlands, Ukraine, United States of America.

Apologies if you're not in the list, this is all I could recall off the top of my head, I am convinced I have forgotten a few - that in itself will be another post.