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Meatspace as a term has recently worked its way into my consciousness and you know what? I like it. It’s witty and solid. And it makes me want to punch the arm of whomever is standing near me.Curious about where the term originated, I googled it and discovered that the origins are fuzzy. It seems to have been coined sometime between the late 1980s to mid-1990s.
I bring up meatspace because I spent all of yesterday there, with nary a moment on my computer. That’s becoming more of a rarity, even though I lived my entire childhood, teenhood, and young adulthood in meatspace, rather than cyberspace.
Those of a certain age will understand this dichotomy, the splitting of our lives into two worlds, one of which feels more “real” than the other. It’s very easy for those who’ve lived their entire lives in meatspace (a.k.a.” in real life” or “irl”) to dismiss cyberspace as unreal, a waste of time. Meanwhile, youngsters who’ve grown up with both spaces likely don’t see any distinction, except when their elders point it out to them. It’s those of us (or maybe it’s just me) in between who keenly feel the differences between the two, who need the terms meatspace and cyberspace to describe where we’re hanging.
Integration can’t come soon enough.
Just asked Eldest Son whether he makes a distinction between meatspace and cyberspace and his answer was interesting and worth repeating.
“I guess, for me, I have online worlds like WoW so I differentiate between that and real life. But when you think about something like Facebook I think they become more entangled.”
To which I replied,
“Got it. That’s a good distinction. I’m on Twitter and Facebook and the blog, where I interact with real peeps, but I don’t game, so I’m not dealing with an invented worldscape.”
Incidentally, this exchange took place via Facebook chat, which feels more “real” than email because it occurs in close to real-time.
Maybe I’m closer to integration than I thought.