When an Internet Connection is Just the Beginning

The Global Voices team in Santiago

This is a guest post by Sarah Standish, a Global Citizen Corps staff member.

A stranger called out my name in the lobby of our hotel in Santiago. Waving me over, she introduced herself.

“How did you know who I was?” I asked.

“You look exactly like your Twitter picture,” she told me.

This wasn’t the only time such a scene was repeated during the Global Voices 2010 Citizen Media Summit in Chile. The Summit was a time to put screen names, Twitter handles, blogging pseudonyms, and email addresses with faces—to meet people I’d only ever communicated with online, as well as to see faces unknown to me from the Internet or anywhere else.

As interesting and fun as these interactions were, they also presented a question: if you’ve already met someone online, how important is it to also meet them in person? The internet, after all, allows us to access the news, thoughts, and feelings of people all over the world—to be global citizens while staying close to home. So should we meet these far-away strangers? Let’s not forget that if you come from two places that are very far away, traveling to meet comes with a significant cost in time, money, and environmental impact. If you have the option of dealing with people entirely over the internet, is it worthwhile to meet?

For Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman, the answer is a resounding yes—meeting in person is crucial. When I asked him what made Global Voices so successful, he immediately said, “Beer!” Elaborating, he explained that one of the keys to making a virtual organization work was meeting in person and having drinks. (Younger readers and non-drinkers: you could make the same connections over coffee, tea, fruit juice…you name it!). People who work together can get more done face-to-face, and build personal connections that help their work.

Environmental reservations aside, I’d have to agree. Online communication is usually broad and unlikely to be deep in the way that face-to-face conversations can be. (Just because it can be deep—I know people who’ve fallen in love entirely online—doesn’t mean it usually is.) A few minutes in person can also tell you about the depths of someone’s personality in ways that don’t come across in a carefully constructed online persona. While some people complained about how few Chileans spoke English, I was impressed when I saw an Egyptian blogger patiently practicing his Spanish with them—and given that he did so very well, I was even more surprised to learn that he’d only studied the language for a few months! Conversations with another Moroccan blogger I’d known from Twitter revealed the depth of his commitment to highlighting marginalized voices in a way I hadn’t previously realized.

In the best of all possible worlds, online interactions can set a more meaningful stage for personal interactions. If you put a bunch of strangers in a room together, I’d bet they’re more likely to comment on the weather than debate global warming, more likely to exchange platitudes about their children than discuss overpopulation. But if they already know each other from the Internet, then they’d have some ideas about the others’ interests and backgrounds—enough to start a better conversation. And better conversations, whether they happen on or offline, are what makes communicating with anyone—in any format—worthwhile.

Photo by Oso: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oso/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0