Can't Miss a Booth

What this means is that if I'm not surfin' then I am talking about surfin'. I am also a lot more involved in this passion than most people I know. Most of my friends and relatives don't have any idea of what it is I am so caught up with. Therefore I very often find myself attempting to answer questions about this new, seemingly little understood frontier. The frontiers of Space and the West were easy concepts for most people to grasp. This one is a lot more difficult to understand, especially for those who have successfully been able to avoid any contact with the world of the personal computer.

Words like cyberspace, electronic highway, home page and the like are concepts that most people will have lots of difficulty understanding. It doesn't have anything to do with intellect. It is a function of having exposure to it or not. I haven't been too successful in answering the questions. Trying to describe the taste of an orange to an alien creature who has never been to this planet is a good example of the problem. No matter how one tries to convey that concept, the words are never good enough and handing the ET an orange to taste is about the only way. I realized that I can't take everyone who asks about the Web, to my house and give them a ride. I had to come up with a better way to convey the experience.

It's really very simple. Ever since elementary school, there have been times when learning and entertainment experiences consisted of me going somewhere and being shown something. My father and I used to go to the New York Coliseum every year for the Sportsman Show. There was a tremendous floor of exhibits and demonstrations regarding something I was very interested in, the outdoors. It was during these wonderful excursions that I can first remember the feeling that I didn't want to miss a thing. We would plan our day so that we would cover all there was on display. Words like Exposition, Worlds Fair, Street Fair and Exhibit Hall and even experiences in Disney World like Tomorrowland and Epcot start to come close in describing what the Internet and the World Wide Web are.

Going to flea markets has become a weekend activity of mine. The 'mother' of all flea markets and antique shows, Brimfield, starts to come close in the attempts to describe the Web. I have to stay over night in the Brimfield area to be able to satisfy myself that I have seen all there is on display. It takes me two days and on the way home I always think of the sites I forgot to visit. It's almost the same experience each time I go 'surfin'. The Internet and the World Wide Web are a flea market that covers this entire planet. It makes available all the knowledge and information that has ever existed in this world and one will always feel that they have never covered all the booths(sites). No one ever told me this, How Come?