Happy hour goes high tech with online social network

OAKLAND — It would appear to fly in the face of what we know about digital isolation. People are actually turning to the Internet to break free of their computers and grease the levers of socializing.

And that includes night life.

But it takes more than a virtual community to gather at the latest restaurant or the new hot dance club. It takes face-to-face socializing to pull that one off, which is what the online networking site Meetup.com was created six years ago to accomplish.

Ed Stanton turned tech with Meetup.com when he moved from San Diego County to Oakland in December 2007. The 41-year-old replicated the North County Happy Hour group he frequented in Southern California.

"It was a way to rapidly jump into the community in Oakland," Stanton said. "I wanted to make friends."

About eight people showed up for the first Oakland Happy Hour he hosted in January. Nearly nine months later, the group has more than 300 members and a core of regulars who gather Thursdays at mostly BART-accessible bars.

The largest gathering of 36 people happened on a sultry summer night at Quinn's Lighthouse Restaurant and Pub.

Oakland Happy Hour draws mostly tech-savvy local professionals 30 to 45 years old (there are some older and younger) who are new to town — a demographic that is growing through the downtown housing push started by Jerry Brown.

Stanton said Meetup gives people an opportunity to find others with similar interests or backgrounds in a crowded, urban, modern setting where it is paradoxically hard to make friends.

Being in a group also makes people feel easier about going to venues and neighborhoods they might be curious about but that they don't want to go to alone or that are outside their normal comfort zone, Stanton said.

"The bar can be a complete dud but we'll still have fun," he said.

Stanton found a few local Meetup groups organized around nightlife before he started Oakland Happy Hour, but the members seldom met.

"That is obviously not the way to meet friends on a consistent basis," he said.

His is one of the few groups to meet weekly — and some of the members have become friends outside the group.

Many members belong to several groups simultaneously — with interests ranging from cycling to music from the '80s. Stanton said he's a member of about eight groups but Oakland Happy Hour is the only one he regularly attends.

The group has made its way through Pat's Bar in downtown Oakland to The Starry Plough in Berkeley, where pints were sipped one recent meeting to the sound of a live bluegrass band.

Several members on hand attributed the success of the group to having a good leader.

The organizer is there to help members meet people, according to Stanton. He finds the bars, and makes newcomers feel welcome and included. And members always know they have somewhere to go on a Thursday.

Flakey no-shows don't interfere because he selects venues where people can come and go and pay for their own libations. That way he doesn't get stuck with a big check for others' drinks.

Meetup groups have a certain Darwinian nature. They die off when organizers get tired of organizing, as Stanton put it. But new ones are always forming.

I haven't begun to count all the Bay Area Meetup.com groups organized around nightlife, dining and cocktails that have been revealed to me. I don't know whether to be embarrassed at my ignorance of Meetup.com or feel fortunate for never relying on any kind of online matchmaking in an age of digital dominance. But am I the one who is out of touch?

Oakland Happy Hour is part of the evolution of the Web that has, in the words of some researchers, revolutionized social interactions, for good or bad. The bad — social isolation — is the demon Meetup.com founder Scott Heiferman set out to bash into oblivion when he founded the site in 2002. But at Meetup, it's called "screen addiction."

The affliction is an increasingly common disorder in which electronic screens invade every corner of people's lives, according to a site better known from the 2004 presidential elections. The Democratic Party is still a popular topic among the site's 3 million members in more than 130 countries who supplement screen time with face-to-face time.

Today, members are as likely to seek out fellow ghost trackers, pagans, and knitting fans as other Howard Dean supporters. All they have to do is sign up on the site and start browsing.