Meet Up - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/66/tales-from-the-net

During my first year of college I ran into an online community of glowsticking.com (gsc). On gsc I talked, I made friends, I had fun, and I screwed around. For me (and many other people that were on the forums) gsc became a personal community that we were all part of. The gsc community was just like being in a neighborhood community, church community, or even school community. There were people that were in charge, those that were focused on one element of the community over others, and every other element of a deeply made community. We had talk about theology and philosophy, car mechanics, love, relations, and countless other topics, all under the idea of talking about glowsticking. For me, it was a great community. I could participate, be myself, and do it all from the safety of my dorm room, but then came the summer when there were meet ups.

Meet ups have always been weird to me because it takes everything from a very digital and text based arena, to something that is very physical, and very verbal area. For some people (like me) this is a weird transition of things. My strength (I'd at least like to believe it's a strength) is my ability to write. I write, and I write a lot. It's what I like to do, and hopefully from doing that I've become decent enough at it. However, when I talk, I stammer occasionally, my thoughts are not as clear, and it's not how I want it to be, so I don't like it as much. But then there's the real problem with meet ups - on the internet, no one knows who you are.

For example, for the longest time on GSC I had my profile picture being a hobo that I had taken a picture of and had nothing to do with me. I didn't post many/any pictures of myself, and even the videos of me were in darkly lit rooms with glowsticks spinning around me. My actual image, my voice, and who I was as a physical person, wasn't actually that well known to the people around me. This mystery of who is who lead to a 'Hello my name is' tag given to everyone where you had to put your gsc name. Not your real name, your name that you had on the internet.

This funky little tradition is something that is unique to the internet. Normally you learn who a person is, what they look like, what they sound like, and who they are physically first, and then you get to learn about who they are mentally, but with the internet it's totally different. One of the most interesting phrases that came out of people's mouths at gsc meet ups were things like, "You're not Asian?" or even better, "You're a girl?" (the second not said to me, obviously, but you get the point). Where else in the world can you get to know people, talk to them, have deep conversations about philosophy and religion, and not know their gender? It's a unique world, the internet, because it provides perfect anonimity. It's a powerful thing, and is eye opening to what you find is important about a person. You find that it doesn't matter what a person actually looks like, or if they're rich or poor, it focuses in on their personality, education, sense of self. It's a great thing when you can finally look past skin color, ethnicity, gender, financial status, and instead you can focus on the person on the inside. Given, it's not perfect because you're still focusing on people with names like 2Sec0 or GlowFlow and there's some flaws within the system, but in a truly idealistic setting, the internet is a one of a kind place that allows people to talk equally with one another for better (in some places) or worse (in every other place where people are just unknowingly inconsiderate to one another).