“recovery begins when one alcoholic talks with another alcoholic, sharing experience, strength, and hope.” (Foreword to the Third Edition, Big Book)
Since 2020, there are now lots of online meetings, online workshops, online opportunities to tune into good and interesting speakers on all sorts of topics. Flyers proliferate, to the extent that some online spaces have had to prohibit the posting of flyers, as they have on occasion come to displace the actual content of those spaces. I can also see the need for certain types of online meeting (particularly to bring people together who cannot meet physically, to give people who live remotely or in sparsely populated areas the chance to interact with a wider range of people), but there’s a terrible danger. Every online event attended by people is taking those people away from other activities. Often those are not meetings: I certainly attend online meetings at times when I do not attend face-to-face meetings, because time constraints are such that I can log on and attend for twenty minutes, half an hour, or an hour, whereas I would not have time to travel and attend and travel back.
The danger comes when I attend online meetings instead of face-to-face meetings. The cost is two-fold: firstly I have a watered-down experience of a meeting; secondly I lose the opportunity to be useful in a physical meeting locally, especially where newcomers need physical interaction. I’ve gone back to focusing on physical meetings, and I’m more swift, now, to carry a message rather than a flyer.