Recently I gave a talk to the kindergartners at the Alperin Schechter School in Providence, Rhode Island, on this topic. Since many grownups find my virtual closet more difficult to grasp than kindergartners do, I thought you might like to hear about it too.
I started by writing the words "vir-tu-al" and "web" on the blackboard, and, holding up a large mirror, I asked a little boy called Daniel to look into it. "What do you see?" I queried. "I see me," he answered promptly. "How do you know it is you?" I persisted. "I have seen me before," he replied. "Very good," I said. "Now is the you that you are looking at standing next to you, or is he behind the mirror?" He obviously thought this was a silly question, but he was used to silly questions from grownups, and politely humored me, and told me that he was behind the mirror. "And what if someone looked behind the mirror, would he see you there?" "Of course not," he replied, even more shocked at my ignorance. "If your mother, or whoever looks after you, told you that you had some soot on your nose, would the mirror help you to find and remove it?" He readily agreed that it would. "Now you understand what 'virtual' means," I said. "The you in the mirror is not in our real world, but he is very useful all the same. He is a virtual you." The child nodded, and the rest of the class seemed to approve.
"Now I am going to ask you to imagine something," I continued. "Imagine that your parents, or whoever looks after you, told that they were going to give you a large closet, all for yourself, in which you could put anything that you like a lot. Not only that, but they would allow any of your friends to come and visit your closet, and all the treasures in it, at any time they wanted to do so. They would not be allowed to visit the rest of the house without permission, but that closet would always be there for them. Now what things would you put in that closet?" A forest of little hands went up. You can imagine the candidates for inclusion: barbie dolls, storybooks, tape recordings, drawings... "Well," I announced, "I have a virtual closet. It is not made of wooden shelves, a carpeted floor, metal hooks, a large door, like a real closet. But is it useful, just like the virtual Daniel, and not only my friends, but anyone in the world, can visit it at any time they like. And it contains drawings, storybooks, a tape recording, and a calendar with which you can find your birthday according to the Jewish calendar, so long as you know what day it is on the calendar that we usually use" -- and of course all of them did. "This kind of closet lives in a world rather like the world that virtual Daniel lives in there behind the mirror, and we call it cyberspace. And you can reach it with this computer," I said, pointing to the computer standing next to me that was already connected to the Web. "The Web, like a real spider's web, in which the spider can reach any point he wants with great speed, connects all these closets together, and allows us to visit any of them, whenever we want. We can look at the treasures we find there. They are quite safe for their owners, because we cannot steal them, but we can make copies for ourselves if we like."
My little parable can also help you understand why the Web never "fills up", a fear which seems to afflict some people. The Web is simply the filaments which connect all these "closets" which are positioned all over the planet. If you want, you can visit my virtual closet too, and use my calendar, if you have any use for it. Before doing so, please take a look at your virtual image in a mirror. I like my visitors to look their best, even though I cannot see them, do not record their addresses, and do not count how many come.
You can visit Professor Corré's virtual closet
at:
http://www.uwm.edu/~corre/
- if you aren't there already.