When I'm online, I'm alone in a room, tapping on a keyboard, staring at a cathode-ray tube.

If we built houses the way we build software, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

Data isn't information. ... Information, unlike data, is useful. While there's a gulf between data and information, there's a wide ocean between information and knowledge. What turns the gears in our brains isn't information, but ideas, inventions, and inspiration. Knowledge-not information-implies understanding. And beyond knowledge lies what we should be seeking: wisdom.

I sense an insatiable demand for connectivity. Maybe all these people have discovered important uses for the Internet. Perhaps some of them feel hungry for a community that our real neighborhoods don't deliver. At least a few must wonder what the big deal is.

Call me a troglodyte; I'd rather peruse those photos alongside my sweetheart, catch the newspaper on the way to work, and page thorough a real book.

Why is it that drug addicts and computer aficionados are both called users?

Merely that I have a World Wide Web page does not give me any power, any abilities, nor any status in the real world.