Ciaran’s Omnipurpose Blog

Explaining the Internet to a Five Year Old

July 30, 2007

This post originally appeared on my Conchango Blog in 2007.

I was having a chat with some friends the other day and we ended up talking about how one might describe the internet to a child.

One of my friends described how, whilst fixing his router, his flatmate’s 5-year old boy asked him, “Why isn’t the Internet in my computer anymore?”. My friend was a little stumped by this question, so he asked the boy what he thought the Internet was. The boy replied, “Google”. Funnily enough, we all pretty much joked that this was the sort of answer our parents would give too. So we started trying to come up with a nice simple definition he could give to the boy.

One of my friends, who hails from Israel, came up with this analogy:

Imagine your fingers are numbered 1-10.
You can touch each finger to another finger.
Imagine that one of your fingers is your computer.
You can touch a finger to the neighbouring computer-fingers on your hands, but you can also touch the fingers of other people anywhere in the world.
Touching fingers communicates with them and shares information with them.
If you can’t directly touch another person’s finger, you can pass messages through someone else.

Another, from Missouri, suggested: “The internet is computers in the world connected to each other, each computer can see stuff that is on the other computer”.

One friend, from Glasgow suggested, “It’s where daddy looks at ladies”.

Another chap, from Croydon, suggested that we should think of tubes or pipes, with water flowing through them.

Of course, there’s always wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet for those of us who like to skip through thinking about how we would define the internet and instead get our definitions ready-made. Well, I say “ready-made”, but of course these ideas are “ready-made” by an ocean of users generating entries at a rate of 200 articles per day.

The other interesting thing about this whole conversation was the group of friends, and the way we were having the conversation. We’ve known each other for years and do things as a group very frequently. What’s remarkable about them is that I would never have met them if it wasn’t for the internet, and apart from meeting up with them in “Real-Life” a couple of times a year, most of our contact is over the Web. Our whole conversation was conducted in our own bulletin board forum. Perhaps this is what we should be using to explain the internet to a child – the internet is a place where people from around the world can share ideas, and build bridges to each other.

Comments: No Comments »
Categories: Work
Comments rss
Trackback

Yummy!

July 22, 2007

Sorry I've been off the radar a bit recently. Several factors have contributed to this:

Work taking up more and more time than ever
Hayfever making me drowsy and unmotivated
The heat in my attic meaning that I can't stand being on the computer
The sunshine keeping me outdoors and away from my computer
Facebook eating up every spare moment I could be using for blogging
Heroes
Gardening

So it's the last point, gardening, that I'd like to tell you all about today. Check out these beauties!

I've become a bit of a greenfingers of late. Rebecca's had to put up with me pottering about in the garden instead of being slumped in the attic on the PC, or out at the gym, but she's also been helping out a lot with moving the plants from growbags into planters. Growbags are pretty good to start with, but don't give much support to the tomatoes when you need to stake them. That's where planters really come into their own (plus you can move the plants around easily). We've got a pretty small garden, but approximately 15 tomato plants, some rocket, some petit pois and a lonely aubergine. Because of where the sun falls, I have to crowd a few of the plants near the kitchen window. A leisurely reakfast on the weekend resembles the state of siege endured by the protagonists in The Day of the Triffids. So I've become a little bit gardening mad. I'm looking forward to the idyll of a place out of town, with a big garden and room for a greenhouse. Soon after that, I'm sure I'll be fretting about the condition of the lawn and start wearing a dressing gown that doesn't quite close properly, slippers and maybe even start smoking a pipe.