HOWTO explain the Internet to a Dickensian street urchin

From Fast Company's ongoing "Explaining Everything With Flowcharts" series, a flowchart showing how a time-traveller could explain the Internet to a Dickensian street-urchin. Very funny stuff and excellent use of a maze!

Flowchart: Understanding the Web, for Fans of Charles Dickens (via MeFi)

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Boba Fett Diop

Cool! Now let’s explain Chatroulette to an 18th century French courtesan!
- allium
  
  But I don’t speak French. I suppose I’ll have to use the universal language of love…the language that OW SYPHILIS.
  - Karl Jones
    
    But I don’t speak French. I suppose I’ll have to use the universal language of love…the language that OW SYPHILIS.
    
    That is the funniest thing I have ever read. Ever. I can’t explain it, I can’t help it, I’m not proud of myself.
    
    Last night I was in a classroom situation where revealing that I had read such a thing during lab time, and found it hysterically funny, would have been a major embarrassment … it was all I could do to crush my face into some parody of calm, and even then I had to repeatedly turn away from the students (thank God it was late and only a few remained) in order to release a silent shuddering guffaw.
zunjine

Dickensian, surely?
- wgmleslie
  
  Yes.
Jack

I just cried a tear of laughter. This is awesome!
Anonymous

Wonderful flow chart: I have always liked flow charts but you don’t often see one that makes you laugh out loud. (Though it seems that this source … )

And, just to add to all the others, Cory will you please use the spell checker as a favour to the rest of us? This ain’t the first time. And I am well aware that many riters ar bad spelers, but there is technology to assist you. (Doesn’t always work, which is why you probably need people like me — proof readers.)
sayeth

The plague-carrying rat giving you plague should actually be fleas from the plague-carrying rat biting you. He’s confused the vector with the reservoir.
- Boba Fett Diop
  
  Also, plague wasn’t really an issue for London in the 1830s. Water-borne diseases on the other hand…(cf. turthalion, Dr. John Snow, et al.).
turthalion

If it’s 1835, the section talking about explaining it as a “series of tubes” with the urchin responding “like the tubes that run under the city”, and you responding “yes, but not carrying fecal matter” is wrong.

London’s sewers were not yet constructed in 1835.

Thank you, Seven Wonders of the Industrial World.
- Anonymous
  
  Also, the intertubes actually do, predominantly, carry fecal matter.
  - turthalion
    
    > Also, the intertubes actually do, predominantly, carry fecal matter
    
    Oh, well played. You sir, win one set of Intertubes.
    
    Of course, given what they carry, how do you feel about that?
monstrinho_do_biscoito

i enjoyed that
kateweb

this made my cat woke me up before dawn morning.
Anonymous

Go to 1975 to show the urchen the beginning of the internet.
Angry programmer beats you to death for using rectangles instead of diamonds for “decisions” in your flowchart.
You Die.
jtegnell

I gotcher dickenian right here
HealthStudent

Teddy Ruxpin reference for the win.
Anonymous

Zunjine is right. It is “Dickensian”.
knoxblox

Cute, but I would find it very positive thinking to believe that Twitter will still be a primary mode of communication in 3085.

Meanwhile, your previous passenger is stuck back in 1835, cursing your name.
- Anonymous
  
  But your previous passenger is an 1835 native, so it’s okay.
Pantograph

It even has a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
SamSam

This author would be great at creating old adventure computer games. That’s a game I want to play!

And yes: “Dickensian.”
Phyrkrakr

WTH is up with the site, the pop window to look at the image full size doesn’t have any scroll bars. Annoying site design is annoying.
Anonymous

1) Explain to urchin that the internet is like the post (mail). All of the post is handled by machines and delivered nearly instantaneously. You can correspond with anyone else using it. Great intellectuals, harlots, libraries, and beggars. Even machines so complicated, they seem to think.

2) Beat him until he understands. (when in Rome…)
Anonymous

where’s the props to david cross? i’m pretty sure this was inspired by his material
Anonymous

If Jack the Ripper is alive and killing in 1835, he/she/ve must have a time machine, too!
yepmatt

Funny comments, with lots of tongue-in-cheek and clever humor. Interestingly, though, no one seemed to notice how this flowchart is a perfect way to teach Wittgenstein’s theory of how language in general works (language games). Though humorous and evocative, Cory’s post is actually quite philosophical — deeper than it appears!