It's not a truck, it's a series of tubes

one US senator's enlightening explanation of the internet, from Wired magazine:

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
......They (commercial organisations) want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.
It's a series of tubes.
And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material.

What it does show is people find it really hard to visualise the vast infrastructural network that is the internet; it is somehow intangible spatially. Which ineviatbly leads to a lot of misundertanding of how it works and what you can do with it...

ghost town

It's hard to imagine in a world that seems so densely populated that places could be deserted by their residents, but the following towns and villages in UK have been deserted and never repopulated:

Hallsands, Devon - destroyed by storm 1917
Imber, Wiltshire - given over to army for training purposes WW2
Knapstoft, Leictershire - deserted in 17th century
St Kilda, Scotland- evacuated 1930
Sturston, Norfolk - given over to army WW2
Tottington, Norfolk - given over to army WW2
Tyneham, Dorset - given over to army WW2

Other towns are simply lost due to development or climate:
Ashopton, Derbyshire - under reservoir
Derwent, Derbyshire - under reservoir
Dunwich, Suffolk - under the sea
Shipden, Norfolk - under the sea

It's more serious on USA and other countries with more population movement: for instance here are more than 6,000 abandoned sites of settlement in the state of Kansas alone. source wikipedia

Other town's are abandoned because of disaster's that make them uninhabitable; Chernobyl in Russia being a good example of the ultimate ghost town. Here you can read the accounts of one woman's trips back to Chernobyl on a motorcyle: elena

Of course you can't say the word Ghost Town without conjuring up the Special's song of the same name