ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the history of social distance in human communications from the earliest types of messages, to letters transmitted via postal systems, to the invention of the telegraph and the telephone, and on to contemporary emails, instant messages (IMs), and social networks. Information communication technologies (ICTs) are dramatically changing how people now experience both distance and time in their daily lives. Space and time are, of course, related in the world of theoretical physics, but within the scope of this investigation, they are linked by the way they are perceived by the users of ICTs. The phrase virtual community refers to groups of people who use online capabilities to communicate or to pursue common activities or goals. The invention and distribution of the telephone in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries probably did more to influence most people's altered perceptions of distance than any other prior message delivery system.
