My name's John. I'm an alcoholic and sober as
a member of the AA class of 1980. I just got my 20 year chip this month, for
which a lot of people are very grateful, and I most of all.
I am kind of an old-timer on the Internet. In
1968 I was working at the Rand Corporation, doing some research for the Department of
Defense. The guys down the hall in Computer Sciences were
sending computer
output down to the telephone exchange in Santa Monica and back and
comparing it with the data they sent across the room.
It was kind of messed up when it came back from the telephone system. We have
found other ways of messing it up since then... Two years later, in 1970, we
had coast-to-coast hookup. There was already a network, 30 years ago,
but there were only 18 computers on it and they didn't really talk
to each other. What we had was little computers sitting by the big ones, called
"imps," and they talked to each other about their "daddy" computers and that
was the best we could do at that time.
From
that 18, today we have about 70 million computers online, and that's a lot.
I just came back from a face-to-face meeting
of my online group, thanks to Doug and Laura who got
Lamplighters together for a face-to-face meeting. We also had a bunch
that met at the 1995 San Diego meeting. It seems that whenever an AA member
puts a computer online, the first thing he does is to try and find other AA
members. We think the first contacts between
AA members were around 1986. There are more
experts on that subject in this room than anywhere else you could find, and some
may know an earlier date, but I think it was around there.
By July of 1991, thanks to a couple of
pioneers, they started to have regular email meetings on
Genie. That was Lamplighters, the first group, which as Jim
mentioned has been the largest group as well as the oldest group, followed
closely by MOMS. How many Meeting of Minds members do we have out here? (Hands show)
It started in Scotland and is almost as old
as Lamplighters. It's been meeting on the air 24 hours a day,seven days a week ever since then, serving
Alcoholics Anonymous members who wanted to meet for one reason or another.
Other than that little piece of history, I want to talk about diversity, the number of different kinds of groups, the
many different kinds of members who participate, and some of the problems
that we are having. Diversity... there are all kinds of groups now, large and small.
Some groups break off when they have more than 40. Some are huge. I don't know what
size Lamplighters is now, around 500-600, I think, but somebody here probably knows. There are now
meetings in English, Spanish,
Portuguese, French, German, Danish and perhaps a couple
of other languages now. There are men's
meetings, women's meetings, young people. Gay
meetings. When I did the annual inventory, trying to find all the groups on the Internet, which I have done
every year for about the last 5 years or so, I found a group named GLBTYPAA,
which stands for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transsexual Young People of
Alcoholics Anonymous and they're on the Internet! I didn't stop in for a
visit, because I'm not qualified as a young person.
Some of the meetings are Big Book Meetings,
some are step meetings, some discourage off topic discussion, some
discourage cross talk, some encourage cross talk, some encourage thread discussion.
You may have seen discussions of such things as recovered versus
recovering, or should you use medications if you are an AA member; things like that.
Some of them have a full list of officers, GSR, Intergroup Reps.,
For those who are not aware of it, the Online
Intergroup of AA formed after the last International Convention, growing out of the Living Cyber Committee
that put up the Hospitality Room.
Incidentally, there is a hospitality room
again here in Minneapolis for onliners, it's on the 5th floor of the Hyatt Regency. If you haven't
visited, get over there and say hello to your online friends , face to face
there.
Some meetings are just social gatherings,
apparently. Some of them provide representatives to the Intergroup, some
don't. Some of them contribute to GSO, some of them contribute to the
Intergroup, some don't. There's a new online group that I really enjoy called AA
History Buffs. It's just a terrific meeting that has been covering a lot of AA
history and I have learned a lot of things that I didn't know.
As far as who participates nowadays in these
things, some of our friends without computers think that the only people
who do this are some kind of computer geeks, but there are all kinds of
people participating. Most of them are regular AA members who go to lots
of face-to-face meetings. That's the bulk of most of the members of
email meetings. There's also a large number who cannot participate in ordinary,
face-to-face, traditional AA meetings.
Most of us who grew up in those traditional
meetings, imagine that everybody who's a drunk can go to those
meetings. Not true!
Let me give you some categories of people
that can't just go down to the church basement... There are the homebound,
including those who are bed-ridden,... there are those with mobility impairments who can't
move around very well and can't get to the meeting. There are a lot of
members who can't hear well.
There's a large number of members who are
caregivers and can't leave people in their care who are too young, too old or
too ill and the caregivers can't find a substitute who can cover for
them. There are shift workers,including shift workers in places where there
are only 1 or 2 meetings and those meet while they are working. They can't do it. Probably at some time, some of you here may have fallen into one of
those categories. There are remotely located people. Once on
Lamplighters, we had a guy that was on an oilrig off the coast of China. At the same time, we had one at the North Pole and one at the South Pole. Some one
wisecracked that it was a bi-polar group...
But there are also remotely located people in
the United States, in a small town where perhaps there
is no meeting, or there is only one little meeting and it meets once a week.
Maybe they want more AA than that. Well, if they are hooked up to a
computer, they can get it. And finally, there are a few agoraphobics, people with social
anxiety that are afraid to go out of the house or afraid to go out in public
very much.
Now all of these don't sound like much when
you just read it off in a list like that, but if you add up the potential
numbers of them altogether, we're talking about between 1 and 2 million alcoholics.
That's about as many people as we have currently in the membership of the
entire North American AA, somewhere in that range. So there are a lot of people
that could be served by online AA,even more than there are now. At the present
we have about 150 groups, give or take, and about 6,000 people participating. Every time you say a number it
suddenly gets bigger. By the time you count
it again, it's bigger.
There's a lot of people that have special
needs that are getting a lot out of online AA. I saw a letter the other day
and I brought it along, just because it puts a personal touch on that
statistic. This one was from a chap who's hard of hearing. It says;
"I'm still sober but my sobriety was in
grave danger a few years ago as my hearing decreased. I found less and less
value in meetings. Finally, when I could no longer hear the speaker at all, I
left. For 2 years I did without meetings, trying to stay sober on literature
alone. At last I realized it wasn't working all that well. True, I had not
picked up a drink but I was starting to feel and think like an active
alkie. It was only a matter of time until the booze re-appeared. I had to do something, but what?
Enter online AA and an email group, one of the more
than 100 online groups around the world (there are more now). I found the
AA that I had been missing. In fact, it's even better than the meetings in
church basements I used to attend. All of the love, help, advice,
pertinent comments, impertinent comments and sense of humor as well were
available to me everyday. In the old days, I used to go to 1 maybe 2 meetings
a week. Now I make 7 to 14 meetings per week right here at my desk. I
love these people and they in turn love me. I have stayed sober the last 3
of my 17 years of sobriety just because of their help."
I think that's a powerful message. People who
are from the deaf group participate in online AA without anyone even
knowing that they have a disability. Our last Chairman, Rick, of the
Online Intergroup is hard of hearing. And nobody even knew that until he
had finished his term and he told us. Our present Chairman, is Werner
here? Our present Chairman is a
German citizen. It doesn't make any difference, Germany is 2 seconds further away from the meeting.
There are some problems. One of the problems
that we've had is
organizational. I've spent a lot of time and
some others have spent a lot of time, trying to find a place for the online
groups in the general service structure and it won't work, it doesn't fit.
When our forefathers in AA put together the general service structure, they,
I think unconsciously, did it geographically. We don't think about that
often but it's true. The areas line
up with the state and provincial lines of the
United States and Canada, here in the US and Canada. Cyberspace doesn't line
up that way. There isn't any point that you can say you're in this
district or you're in this area. So we haven't been able to really put together a
general service structure up to now for online AA groups. It will come. A lot
of people are working on it.
What will probably happen is something
growing out of the Online Intergroup or associated with it in some way, will
transform itself into some kind of service structure. There is already a good
bit of service going on, there are a lot of committees, lot of useful work,
lot of helpful work.
Sometimes I think the excessive anonymity
that we have in online AA is a problem because people are able to say things
online that they probably wouldn't say face to face. That's a problem
for us and it's working itself out over time I think. So we still have some
arguments and some shootouts and some flames and some threads that you get
tired of, and things of that sort. But all in all, the online AA experience is
turning out to be a great way to do AA. If there are
problems, there are solutions.
Most of the problems are not technical. Most
of the problems are problems of drunks acting like drunks. And I think it's
all going to work well. Any problems we have left are being worked out
rapidly.
That's all I have.
Thank you.