Words collide (#dblogcheck)

Once upon a time, the Internet was thought to be like a high-speed road. Some thought of the Information Highway as a path towards unfamiliarity and confusion, much like the Jackie Robinson Parkway which twists and turns through parks and cemeteries before dumping you amid the streets of Brooklyn. Others thought of it as a way to make more distant locales seem closer, like Interstate 80 which can guide me from my home in New Jersey to San Francisco, California without making a single turn. But, like a highway, it was one-dimensional, both in who used it (techy-type people) and what it carried (text.)

Then it went from being one Highway to an intricate lattice of highways that not only crossed continents, but somehow crossed oceans as well. Its reach connected to every type of home and every type of person. They called the network of roads the World Wide Web. Software programmers used little spinning earth-icons to reinforce its long and multi-dimensional reach.

But the World wasn’t big enough for some. They had to make it even bigger and expand the metaphor beyond the third rock from the sun and into space that hasn’t yet been fully discovered. Entering: CyberSpace. Its capabilities had again expanded, but its user-base was lagging.