Just how real is the Net?

[Orion]

I think those are all very interesting questions. From what it seems like, most people have at least one hub in their household, but middle-upper class might have one for each member of the family. I imagine it as basically a large, thick cable built into a chair, pretty much exactly like the Matrix.

I'm confused. Is a hub a "web site" or the physical object used to jack into the Net? Or is it a physical object used to jack into a particular "web site?" I pictured it more that a person would jack into their virtual city for work, but could change where the jack took them by entering a new destination (searching for a website) in the real world.

I also think that it could be possible for a fairly tech savvy teen to make one, but the results of anything that goes directly into your brain not being juuuust right sound pretty catastrophic to me.

Again, I was thinking hubs were more like websites. Having your own personal virtual world outside of the major communal worlds like cities.

What do you think it should be like, Orion?

I would think that creating one's own "web site" would be like real world web design; someone who doesn't know what they're doing and tries to code it themselves will end up with a piece of shit. While creating one's own hub might be possible, it would take technical skill to make it halfway decent. And with the tech being experimental, there may be dire consequences if an amateur plugs into a buggy web site.

I would think too that the technology, being new and experimental, would make people's own hubs rather expensive and difficult to maintain. I could see people paying for these services much like a web design/host company, but it wouldn't come cheap due to the difficulty and fragility of such technology.

Also in the way that the Net is described, I don't see a lot of bending the rules ala Matrix. At least not just with one's will when they are jacked in. It might be possible to run code or scripts that allow certain, normally impossible actions (eg. flight), but I would think this would be tightly regulated.

Those are the thoughts I have for the time being.