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This week, I met someone off teh internetz. He was neither a fourteen-year-old girl, nor a slightly greasy, overweight, predatory man pretending to be a fourteen-year-old girl. He was Boz from the splendid the further adventures of boz.

Now, I don’t know whether the two of you who read this nonsense (inadvertently, during a search for the inner meaning of the film Mean Streets or, more troubling, “old lady sex”) have ever felt the same – that it would be fun to meet up with someone with whom you have a history of online communication. I don’t mean in a Gaydar-ish way or whatever the straight alternative is (is there one?). Rather, I mean that, after reading and commenting on each other’s blogs, and, of course, twittering, feeling like meeting for yer actual physical pint would be a fun and kind of obvious thing to do. Maybe people are doing this all the time. If they are, I don’t hear a lot about it.

So, we met. It was a bit peculiar for both of us at first – we knew what the other looked like, and we knew odd bits of information about each other, but we were still, effectively, strangers. But we both acknowledged the oddness of the situation, and agreed to confront it rather than pretend it didn’t exist; I suggested that we should feel free to ask each other questions that might, in more orthodox circumstances, feel somewhat blunt or artless. And, wonderfully, that freed us up tremendously. And before long we were chatting away easily and familiarly. And I think copious amounts of cheap lager only helped.

It felt exciting to be meeting someone new as a result of recent changes in communication technology – to be, if you will, breaking the fourth wall of social networking. It felt like we were conferring a legitimacy on a means of communication that is regularly derided as faddish or infantile; that we were proving that it is the old-fashioned need to reach out to other people, and have that reciprocated, that drives it all, rather than some misguided, vacuous indulgence of the ego.

I’ve no great moral to draw from this other than the observation that it’s fun to make new friends, and that I’ve done so in a way that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. And that, while the internet can be a repository of bile and ego and darkness and vacuity, it’s only so because it’s inhabited by people, and, like people, it can also be rather wonderful.

IN SUMMARY: Winter, spring, summer, or fall/All you have to do is call. Or tweet. Well, look, put something on your blog and I might leave a comment. OK?

Tags: lovely people, new exciting things, pooh-poohing the naysayers, social-ontheweb