Internet Army Wanted, Inquire Within

The Internet has enabled the tearing down of barriers and bringing people together in ways that have no real parallel among other communication forms. The telephone can approximate some aspects of it with the capacity for hundreds of people to join a single conference call, but the scale is so much smaller than is possible online, and there is no persistence to the data generated by the call. The fact that data generally persists on the internet enables people to break down not only barriers caused by geographic distances, but also barriers created by temporal distances. I can respond to a blog or news article that was first posted weeks, months, or even years ago, and it's still possible that I could get a reply from the original author or spark new discussions based on the old information. And then we have the vast array of groups that have been created that would not have been possible without the internet, if only because the people who join them had no easy way of finding one another. It's possible to find a group of enthusiasts for just about anything you can think of and begin contributing to their discussion immediately. And the free-form and changeability of the Internet let's people imagine and implement new ways of communicating and meeting with others, from SnapChat to Vine, and more. The social changes brought about by the Internet are far from over, and it will be exciting to see how our social interactions continue to evolve as it becomes ever more ubiquitous.