What Is Meatspace?
Because a couple people were wondering about it, here’s a repost from an lj comment I made. Hopefully this clears a few things up about…
Meatspace: I think I probably picked the term up on slashdot back in the day, possibly before myspace even existed. Meatspace is simply what a lot of people call ‘real life’. I started referring to internets and meatspace because a lot of my friends (granted, I don’t talk to them much) on myspace and facebook are from high school, so they’re “real life” friends, but now I only interact with them on the internets. The line’s also blurred because a couple of my lj friends I would easily consider just as important as some of my meatspace friends, although not quite as close as some of my best friends in meatspace. (How sad, I have a hierarchy of friends developed in my mind that I hadn’t even considered until now.)
Part of the appeal of the term (for me) is that Bender on Futurama would often call organic lifeforms meatbags (shooting DNA at each other to reproduce, which he found disgusting). To further clarify, my meatspace friends are the ones I’ll go and play games with or go out to eat with or a drink (although the last is fairly seldom nowadays). In other words, if I see them in the flesh, they’re meatspace friends. If not, then they are internets friends (coming down the tubes and all that).
Tags: terminology