“I’m a physical person,” Greg told me. “I like to be with people. I like ‘reading’ people for body language and all that.” From the very start he was aware of the perils and limitations of the Internet in such areas as love. You had to trust the words of strangers, not sharing their own reality. “Relationships are established where one party is totally sincere and all that, and the other one is just getting a laugh out of it.” Just the same, he could not resist touring the Internet and the bulletin board to which his international connections led. Young people like Greg Smith, who sought out new places on the Net, whether bulletin boards or electronic libraries, were vaguely like the Jack Kerouacs of the ’50s who liked bumming around the United States for its own sake. Some would describe the high-tech Kerouacs as “net surfers.” But the phrase “net surfing” has become so trivialized in the media that perhaps we should return to the Kerouac analogy.[7.4] _Kerouing_, not surfing. Stark differences, of course, existed between the international Internet and the American towns of _On the Road_, the famous Kerouac novel. Greg had spent some time in the United States when he was ten years old and loved to keep up with American sports, but he was very much a creature of Australia, with a distinctly Aussie flavor in his accent and values. Nor was he a rebel in the true Kerouac tradition. You could be a library science major and still soak up the culture of the Net; you didn’t have to hop on and off freight trains and risk poverty or a severed leg. In fact, while hooked into an established institution such as a corporation or a university, you just might do better than if you had to buy all the gadgetry yourself—just so you didn’t flunk out while you were partaking. A _teacher_ might even encourage your wanderings. And that was how Greg ended up on the Net for the first time in 1992. He found himself logging onto electronic bulletin boards all over the planet, with bizarre names such as “Badboy’s Better BBS System” or “Chatsubo.” He was at least partly drawn to such places because they were so much like neighborhoods or small towns. Each came with its own set of friendships, love affairs, and feuds that could reach an intensity even greater than those on the discussion areas of the main Net. The woman who married Rush Limbaugh is said to have exchanged tart words with Limbaugh on CompuServe at the start of their relationship, and the same happened with Greg and Sue. They did not attempt an alt.personals-style romance. Via Chatsubo he and she were just patterns of dots on each other’s cathode ray tubes. In fact, the two even butted heads over the question of whether certain people were abusing computer resources.