I feel like we have experienced a second Eternal September with the rise of smartphones. I started using the internet in the late 90s (so after Eternal Septembe

I feel like we have experienced a second Eternal September with the rise of smartphones. I started using the internet in the late 90s (so after Eternal September), but even in my early days of being online it wasn't at all normal to spent lots of time on forums, chat rooms etc. Doing so made you a nerd/geek (not necessarily in a bad way). So the communities you encountered online, while less elitist than in the pre-Eternal September days, were still mostly drawn from a small, specific subset of society who shared common interests (and probably socio-economic backgrounds). Nowadays the "online community" is not just the entire community, it is in fact larger and more diverse than any actual real-life community. It feels like a third age; the online population went from a handful of academics in US universities, to a larger (but still small, relatively speaking) group of like-minded individuals, to literally everyone. The internet isn't dead, it's just different now. And sadly, maybe it's not really for us anymore.