Lyrae recently asked if she was the only one around who googled old friends.

No. The practice was first introduced to me by a friend who would google people he would meet and find interesting. I initially thought that was a bit stalker-esque, but now I do it whenever I want more information on a new person, and yes, when I wonder whatever happened to so-and-so.

Last summer, this led me to having dinner with my now-married very first boyfriend, an evening I would describe as odd, and full of nervous laughter and silences. It was extremely bizarre to see, over a decade later, a larger, altered version of someone I once knew, a stranger who knew all sorts of peculiar things about me that I myself had forgotten.

Meeting someone in person when you’d only known them online used to be weird, but now it’s almost completely normal. I say “almost completely” because I still get strange looks when I say “this is my friend X, I met him online”, but less and less. Meeting my fellow bloggers was actually much easier than having dinner with my friend of over ten years ago, someone I’d known quite well. In the real world. I realized with some alarm that I had more in common with these online people. But this is becoming normal.

Boris recently questioned the distinction between the online and the offline world, and I have to agree. The online/offline distinction is no measure of the reality of the interaction. The main reason why I took up blogging again was because of the lack of social contact that resulted from my hiatus, both online and off.