Introduction
Let’s talk about the Internet. According to Internet World Statistics, over 2.2 billion people spend some amount of time online. That is nearly one third of the world’s total population. The Internet is by far the largest outlet of socialization in the world today. Online interactions have become more and more complex, moving from the most basic transfer of information through emails and text-only pages to extremely intricate online communities. These communities aren’t only in the form of social networks like Facebook; they also exist in other, more specialized areas like business, homegrown artistry, and music.
Something strange has happened because of this new tool of socialization. What originally was merely some intangible construct has, most certainly, begun to leak into the real world. People with small ideas forge mighty corporate entities that yield millions of dollars in profits and yet don’t actually exist anywhere else but on the Internet. Virtual relationships become real life marriages, artists showcase and sell their work all over the world without ever leaving their house, and revolutions spring up in virtual space that cripple despotic regimes. The power of the Internet lies in the power of ideas. It doesn’t matter who your parents were or what college you went to or the size of your paycheck. This, I believe, is why we flock to virtual space day in and day out.
The Internet is becoming more than just a collection of ideas on a computer screen. It is more than our Facebook profiles, our YouTube subscriptions, and our news feeds. The Internet defines us as a society in powerful ways. The once intangible becomes a real and in your face culture. As we spend more and more time online, it’s inevitable that our minds will be shaped by what we experience. In this paper, we will seek to understand the effects that these online communities have on our offline lives and look at ways that our culture has been forever changed by the Internet.
The Rise of Online Societies
In his famous work Politics, Aristotle makes the statement that “Man is a social animal”. It makes complete sense therefore, that once the Internet was established and made available to the public that people would begin to seek out other individuals like themselves and form the first online societies. Most academics are firmly versed in what constitutes a society or the more intimate community. The idea is simple enough; coming from the Latin word societas, a society is a community, nation, or broad grouping of people having common traditions, institutions, and collective activities and interests (Mirriam-Webster). This definition lends itself well to using the word “society” to identify more specialized groups rather than the large scale usually associated with the term. With this in mind, I will be using the term “society” throughout this paper instead of “community”, as I feel that the connotations of a society fit more closely with online groups.
From the definition provided by Mirriam-Webster, we know that societies are formed when people start seeking out others like themselves. When I find someone who is interested in similar things, I naturally want to associate myself with that person and interact with them using our mutual interests as a catalyst for a deeper relationship. Would you be surprised if I told you that the same thing regularly happens between people sitting in front of computers that are often hundreds or thousands of miles away from each other? In this respect, the Internet is a sort of long-distance relationship enabler. Living in Tinytown, USA doesn’t afford me a wide variety of people to interact with, but joining a social network like Facebook or playing an online game like World of Warcraft might.
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