July 16,1996

Eight months ago it wouldn't have taken much to convince me that WWW stood for the "Wicked, Wild Web." I had heard the tragic stories of pubescent boys unknowingly seduced by pedophiles posing as peers. I had read account after account of lonely women and girls suckered into parting with their savings or their virtue for a cyberslime. I knew the evils of Internet.

Or at least I thought I did. What I discovered once my son and my friend Christian convinced me to join the web was a totally different world. I found an avenue of research, a forum for my creativity, and a link to the world. In the last seven months I have utilized Internet in my personal and professional life, and I simply cannot imagine living without it.

Of course, my husband and daughter would call my usage an addiction, but I like to think of it as a passionate affair with the world, and I am an attentive partner. The deductive reasoning required in researching on Internet fits me perfectly. I am a global thinker, slightly more random than analytical. It has not been that terribly difficult to teach my junior high school students the rudiments of investigation on the WWW. Patience and perseverance are the keys. They are also the keys to learning and using HTML.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is simply the codes needed to transform any text into a document on the Internet. I wasn't on the Web for long before I realized that I wanted a homepage, a site to call my own. I saw that at last there could be an outlet for my creative ventures if only I, too, could publish on the Web. I still don't know how to cleverly design web pages, but it excites me to know that people from many different countries have read my thoughts.

Learning more about the rest of the world is probably my main reason for being on the Internet. I have discovered the fun of net surfing and reading homepages from places like Italy and Nepal. And I have discovered the ultimate high: E-MAIL! I correspond electronically with newfound friends in Sweden, India, Spain, Australia, and Brunei. I maintain old friendships in Denmark, England, and all over the U.S. I no longer have fears of predators and techno-fiends. I want no censorship hampering my Internet usage. I have learned firsthand the worth of the Web, and it is wonderful.