"... people were connecting online for decades before graphical Web pages appeared on the scene." So this technology we refer to as so young, so new and rapidly growing is older than we think; which changes our perspective on understanding it. "Today a map of the Internet is a tensile, crazy, fractal thing; it resembles a beating heart, a web of synapses, a supernova." This idea of seeing the Internet as a beating heart, and every single interface, web-page, user, etc. is the compositional make up of it, this global, big-picture visualization of the internet helps me better understand it and how to utilize it. Hyper-Text-Markup-Language; "... Is ultimately how we understand the world." "Hypertext is, in many ways, the practice of transforming pure data into knowledge. And like programming a generation before, it was where the women were." I am confused, what does she mean by this, where the women were? **MICROCOSM**: "We now, twenty-seven years after the web, live in a world that is driven by data." Data and links to more data, that have more links to other data is how our internet and web essentially functions today. It is based off of information flow, and controlling that flow through choice of the data being communicated. A computer organizes this much more efficiently than humans do, because yes humans have errors and so do computers, but a computer can point out and asses the error quicker and more efficiently than humans can; mainly because of hypertext? "It is the connections she is after: the magnificent complexity of human society and thought, all influencing one another in the unfolding of history." AH I have read A HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy, I don't remember much of the story other than that there are several different planets and it starts out on earth in a pub, but the world is ending on earth? Not sure how that ties into hypertext, but the web definably does make life feel like an ultimate global test to everyone who's aware of and involved in it because it acts as an archive, log of all information and data being communicated from point A to point B, to infinite points.