My flight back to Beijing is delayed, so I have lots of extra time to sit here in an excruciatingly uncomfortable metal chair in Shanghai’s glamorous but oddly lifeless Pudong International Airport and jot down a few thoughts.

It’s been a mad day. I flew into Shanghai this morning on a 10AM flight and headed straight to the convention center in Pudong with my colleague. There we shepherded one of my clients’ global CEO through three interviews with foreign correspondents, followed by a review meeting with their global head of communications. Dinner was a half hour for a plate of McPasta at, of all places, a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf restaurant (stand up, Singaporeans!). Now it’s 9:22PM and my ass is being crucified on this goddamn metal chair while the China Eastern staff plays “guess what time the plane will leave”. Joyous.

I had an opportunity to meet face to face with Asiapundit’s Myrick today, who, in his secret identity as a mild-mannered (and fashionably coiffed!) foreign correspondent, was working the same event my client’s CEO was attending.

Along with Asiapundit, I’ve met two other fellow China bloggers: Gordon, of the Horse’s Mouth, Richard, of the Peking Duck. It’s been an interesting experience every time.

When I was very much younger I was a huge fan of talk radio. I used to put the radio under my pillow and listen until deep into the night. I’m an incurable romantic when it comes to the idea of the distant voice out of the night. I love the idea of the man alone in a studio with a microphone and time to kill.

This romanticism led me into a brief career in radio in San Francisco, where I spent many a ghastly hour as the man alone in the studio, usually spinning abysmal ‘80s music, and later as a producer for another man alone in the studio at a right wing talk radio station. These experiences did a lot to disabuse me of my radio romance, and there are sound reasons (no pun intended) why I discarded radio as a long-term career choice and moved to Singapore to make computer games.

The reason why I take you down my dusty and rutted memory lane is because I think bloggers have something in common with talk radio hosts. They both project personality and opinion into the ether, in a way that most traditional journalists do not. (This is one reason why I think single-author blogs are generally still the best.) You don’t really know a blogger. You just get to know the persona they project via the posts they write, the articles and links they pick and they way they respond to comments. Just because you’re a regular reader of Imagethief doesn’t mean you know who I am. You know something about me: I’m American; I live in Beijing; I do PR; I swing to the political left; I write zany crap. If you haven’t dug through the site and found my photo, you probably have some vague, mental picture of what I might look like, based on the voice I write with. But, in the end, unless you’re one of my personal friends (a few lurk on this site), you’re really building a relationship with this persona of Imagethief.

When I worked in radio, I had an opportunity to meet people who I had listened to for many years. I had first got to know them through their radio personas. I had mental pictures of them based on those personas and the idiosyncrasies of their voices. Those meetings were always bittersweet experiences. I thoroughly enjoyed many of them. But every time I met one of those radio personalities and forged a real acquaintance, some essential mystery was stripped out of prior relationship between the listener and that voice in the night.  Along the mystery went some frisson of joy that would never be the same again.

Meeting fellow bloggers is a little like that. The acquaintance is great and the new friendships are wonderful. But a mental Rubicon is crossed at every meeting, and that element of imagination and mystery --who is the person behind those words on the screen?—flickers away. The voice in the night is illuminated, and becomes just another person like me. I feel some tinge of regret every time.

That being said, it was great to meet Myrick. We had a pleasant chat out front of the Shanghai Convention Center, briefly free of the fug of bureaucratic jargon that filled the inside. We couldn’t shake hands though because, as any readers who are physicists will know, if a spin doctor and a journalist make contact, they annihilate like opposing forms of matter, leaving only a cloud of highly energetic schmoozons.