Living in a Virtual World

If you wanted to meet new people in 1907, you had to go out into the world and talk to them, face to face. This severely limited the geographical size of most people's social worlds as those worlds were limited by how far you could travel. Meeting people was much the same in 1957 as it was in 1907, but once you knew somebody there were additional ways available to communicate with them, specifically the telephone, which led to an expansion of people's social worlds beyond the limits of easy travel. You can still meet people the old fashioned way today, but the introduction and growth of the Internet and the world wide web over the past twenty years have completely removed geographical limits to our social worlds by giving us the tools to meet, get to know and keep in touch with people from nearly every place in the world, regardless of where we are.