Email about five years ago could only be accessed through internet service providers such as: AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, TexasNet, and institution accounts. Now email can be retrieved and sent over the internet without having these big name internet service providers. There are now services like Yahoo, Hotmail, Rocketmail, and Juno that offer free email accounts over the web for any one. Within the past few years, technology has allowed email users to send voice and video emails, which was impossible before. Email still has delays ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes when you send your email over the internet. Ideally, these delays still represents a very fast relay suitable for all practical purposes in email. Email can have more of a real time relay in the future. There is also the possibility of your email not reaching its destination, which we all have experienced at one time. Now we see less and less of our email not reaching our destination with the improvements of transmission lines. Higher bandwidths in these transmission lines allow for higher memory capabilities in our email. Email in the long run will be near a more real time instantaneous speed with the capability of higher memory. .
The frontier myth can be seen from the beginning technological advancement of communications. In 1837, while working independently from one another Samuel F. B. Morse and the two British engineers Sir William Cook and Sir Charles Wheatstone developed a method of sending an electronic message over a distance of several miles almost instantaneously. The implications of this development were enormous. For the first time in history, human beings had the means to overcome the obstacles imposed upon communications by vast distances. A "Virtual world" of human communications had just been born that was much smaller and could potentially be much more closely knit together than the "real" world. Though the concept of virtual place and time would not become part of the terminology of human thinking for almost another 150 years, the foundations were laid with this invention.
