Fourth Year Online

About * Bookstore * BookTalk * Bulletin Board * Chat Room * Congress * Contact * Convenor Blog * Convenors * Cutting Edge * Donate * Email * FAQs * Food&Bev * Forum * Gallery * Humor * Keepers * Lawyer's LifeRing * LifeRing Press * Links * Media * Meetings * Meeting Starter * Membership Survey * Music * New Recovery Blog *Nicotine * Philosophy * Poetry * For Professionals * Quotations * Recreation * Science * Social Network * Testimonials * Thank You * Toolbox * Treatment Finder * Website * Welcome

Kudos for LifeRing -- Read the Testimonials Page and Add Your Own

Unhooked.com Begins Its Fourth Year Online

On June 9, 1999, this web site began its fourth year online. The site began as a one-page site of local news about the San Francisco area SOS meetings. It was then known as http://www.hooked.net/~unhooked/ (don't try that link now!). It met a widely felt need for a web presence that reflected the lively, frequently changing and developing character of SOS. It rapidly grew and attracted contributors from all over the country and from abroad. Less than a year later, it became www.unhooked.com and continued growing. By May 1998, it had became the "unofficial web 'zine of Secular Organizations for Sobriety," and was on the verge of dropping the "unofficial" when legal force majeure intervened.

With the recent name change in the Northern California area, unhooked.com returns to its roots and becomes the unofficial web presence of LifeRing Secular Recovery (LSR). The content is unchanged. The site continues to maintain a list of meetings in all parts of the country. It continues to be a portal and a showcase for the world's largest ongoing secular recovery meeting: Tom Shelley's email list. It continues to provide Keepers, book reviews, toolbox items, all the other features that have a reader constituency. There'll be changes and additions, as usual. The label, of necessity, is new. But the philosophy remains the same -- in three words: sobriety, secularity, self-help.

Where this new development will take unhooked.com is impossible to predict. As webmaster, I've always looked on this site as a great adventure. I never know from one day to the next what will show up in the inbox. I do know this much: the effort has been gratifying. It's helped to create a much-needed sense of community. It's created a platform for numerous people to reach out and be of use to others. It's been a launch pad and service station for a growing number of meetings. The bottom line is: the site has helped people stay sober. At least one that I know of.

My sense is that the community will take the name change in stride. Datsun became Nissan, so what. A rose by any other name. Much more challenging may be the slow crisis of identity that the name change is likely to provoke in the ranks of SOS at large. Who and what are we, really? Are we content to remain an anarchic scattering of islands, haphazardly linked, owning nothing, not even our dented name? Or is it within us to evolve into a collectively self-empowered and cohesive network? Whatever happens, unhooked.com intends to be there and be of service.

It takes a village to raise a web site. This site would be nothing much without the collaboration of its dedicated pagemasters Marianne H., Scott. N., Peggy K. and its new web design and art guru, Aongus C. Above all, the site owes its estimable success to the bite-sized contributions of the many dozens of individuals who have sent in a meeting update, a link, a recipe, a poem, a suggestion, a nitpick, and many other helpful and valuable items. If you will scroll through the incomplete list of these contributors on the Thanks Page, you will see why this site has survived and grown for three whole years -- almost an eon by Internet standards -- and why it strides on confidently into Year Four. Thank you, everyone, for your support.

If you're interested in becoming part of this project, please contact me. There is far more work here, many more ideas and plans at present, than people to make them happen. If the concept of secular recovery attracts you and you are looking for a place where you can be relevant to an audience wider than a local meeting, and if you have abilities commensurate with that vision, and you are sober, then this web site may be the ideal platform for you. If nothing else, the repeated discipline of tending to one's plot in the village garden is a great influence for sobriety.

Marty N. 6/12/99