Blog 6: The Internet as a Community

Chapter 6 in Ryan's book does a good job explaining how the Internet is divided into different communities. He compares the divisions between Internet communities to the divisions between human communities during the beginning of human experience. The difference between the two are that human communities of the past were networked due to proximity, or geographical location. Internet communities are networked based on the users' interests. 

Even with the invention of the telephone lines, people could usually only afford to make local calls because long-distance phone calls were too expensive. Ryan goes on to explain how, in 1975, a man named Joe Engressia realized he could "kill geography" by whistling a specific pitch down the phone line. "Killing geography", in this sense, meant that paying for long-distance calls became obsolete when word of how to trick the phone system made its way around. In turn, this discovery paved way for the "phone phreaks", a group of kids that spent their time experimenting with controlling the phone system.