Hi, I know you from the internet

“Hi”

I pause. This is the moment where I never know what to do. Do you already know who I am? Are our prior interactions on the internet going to continue into this conversation? Are we going to pretend we don’t already know things about each other? Maybe I only know you but you still have no idea who I am?

“Hi, I follow you on Twitter.”
“Hi, oh you’re a friend of a friend on Facebook.”
“Hi, I love your Instagram photos. Nice to meet you in person.”

I hope I live up to my internet persona.

Or do I even say hi? Is it a faux pas to try to meet people in real life that you’ve only heard of online? Do I intentionally pretend I don’t know you?

A funny thing about moving to the Bay Area is that people I used to only ever meet on glowing screens started turning into friends in the real world. Not just sometimes, but pretty darn often. More and more as I’m exploring the area I end up meeting people I’ve actually already interacted with, just not in the real world. The expression “it’s a small world” is becoming truer each day.

I’ve never been a fan of the idea that the social web makes us less social in real life. If anything, Twitter has effectively bootstrapped my circle of friends since I moved across the country. Often meeting people in real life at parties or meetups is ephemeral. Someone is really cool you think, but you’ll likely never see them again unless you go through the cumbersome and socially loaded let’s exchange phone numbers act. They’re effectively gone forever afterwards. Social media allows a continuation with these interesting people, conversation elsewhere, a window into their lives (if publicly broadcast of course), and that golden opportunity for building more of a relationship in the real world. Meet somebody interesting at a party? Follow them and keep the conversation going. You never know what’ll happen.

But that moment where we transition from online into the real world is always touch and go. Internet relationships can be so much more lopsided than real world ones. If you’ve got a million followers you aren’t going to know who I am above the noise no matter how interesting I think you are. There’s a turning point where I have to gauge what exactly you know. Sometimes you really have no idea who I am at all. Other times this flows very naturally, we’re really already friends just meeting in person for the first time.

This is really exciting. The fact that the internet is changing how people meet in real life is great, and it isn’t necessarily something that was happening one or two decades ago in the way that it is now. I hope that over time this becomes more and more commonplace and that social networks become something that enhance people’s real social lives, not replace them.