And what was even more striking to me, and what I really
got hung up on, was that the world inside the screen
seemed to have no physical reality of its own.
If you went and looked for images of the Internet,
this was all that you found, this famous image by Opte
of the Internet as the kind of Milky Way, this infinite expanse
where we don't seem to be anywhere on it.
We can never seem to grasp it in its totality.
It's always reminded me of the Apollo image of the Earth,
the blue marble picture, and it's similarly meant to suggest,
I think, that we can't really understand it as a whole.
We're always sort of small in the face of its expanse.
So if there was this world and this screen, and if there was
the physical world around me, I couldn't ever get them
together in the same place.
And then this happened.