Talks meeting online friends offline & how we've come to embrace it.
In 1993, the web was still a patchy affair at best… but some local pioneers were already declaring the printed word out-of-date as updates of the world's big events, and everyday minutiae, streamed down to early-adopters in real time via the Internet.
View 1993 › or Start at 1989“I’ve been online since I was about 13-14 years old. The whole concept of the Internet to me was meeting people in real life. It was interacting online but then transposing that into real life. I’ve got some examples of that, of someone who popped up on ICQ in 2001-2002. This guy popped up and said, “Hey you like Pearl Jam” and it turned out he lived two streets away and we dated for a year after that. Back in those days I was shunned by my friends saying, “He could have been a serial killer”. The fact is he’s not. And I think we’re so lucky in New Zealand as well because the chances are that if you meet someone online, your friends might know them anyway. Just one or two degrees of separation. Right now my current boyfriend is someone I met on Twitter and I probably never would have met him otherwise. Despite both growing up in Hamilton and having mutual friends, we’d never crossed paths until Twitter. So I’m a real big advocate for it. I’m also the agony aunt on Trade Me’s Find Someone website. I don’t know what qualifies me to do that. Maybe because I’ve had a lot of experience of dating after three-and-a-half years single. Right now, it’s something I’m a real big advocate for because it’s opened up a whole new world within our world. The whole squirm factor has gone now because there’s just been so many positive stories out of it. The positives definitely outweigh the negatives in terms of meeting people online.”