Meatspace -- Refers to real-life,
as opposed to the virtual world including social networks, gaming, chat and streaming video.
Meatspace
is a fun word that plays on the growing irony of how we have to define our realities.
The term originates in science fiction (particularly cyberpunk) as the antonym of cyberspace. We don't use the word cyberspace much anymore, but nerds still like to toy with accepted convention by bending terminology to our whims. Until this century, virtual reality was a science fiction concept, and the most advanced examples of it were clunky toys that no one took
seriously. 20th century humans didn't have to preface a meeting with non-virtual, but 21st century people spend a significant amount of time immersed in
some sort of digital facsimile of life.
This nerdism hasn't broken into the mainstream yet, but it's more and more applicable every year as
people regularly use online services for making friends, chatting, gaming,
dating and nearly any other interaction that used to happen only when two people were within touching distance of each other. We're already at a point where it is sometimes
necessary to clarify if something happened online or in meatspace,
and it's likely we'll soon have to specify that our friends join us
at the Starbucks in meatspace, rather than using their smartphone or Oculus Rift.
