There is a decidedly physical, tangible aspect to the Internet.  There is nothing cosmic or virtual about its electronic machinery.  Messages are transferred between physical computers, and are kept and displayed as physical things.  It's easiest to think of a message as a real object moving around, being split up, recombined, duplicated etc.  Always, it has to exist somewhere as a physical arrangement of memory or of magnetic sections of a disk. 

Domains are the Web's units of organization, its towns, and typically each one lives at a single location on a single computer (although for a worldwide organization there may be several scattered machines holding the same information).  (Information transfer does get slower the farther away you are from the server, retarded by the increasing number of switches and routers through which it has to pass.  A large organization will set up a 'mirror' server closer to the clients.)  A server computer may be host to any number of domains, and its size is physically determined by the storage, on large hard drives, that it provides.

The Web address http://www.stereosociety.com tells us four things:

1.  You access the site 'via http', short for 'hypertext transfer protocol' or HTTP.  This is the only protocol used to access Web sites.  Within a Web site, or in more general situations on the Internet, you will see 'ftp', or 'file transfer protocol'.  This is used when you download a file, such as a program, or an MP3 music file.  From a Web site, this kicks in when you click on a link to download a file; it is said, not surprisingly, that it is downloading 'via ftp'.

2.  You will communicate with the site www.stereosociety.com using a 'www', or 'World Wide Web' browser.

3.  You are accessing the domain called 'stereosociety'.  This could be physically located anywhere in the world, although we happen to be in New York City with the physical information stored in Atlanta.  The domain stereosociety.com incorporates a Web site, but it also has files for download and is a repository for E mail.

4.  This domain is registered in the USA, shown by the absence of a country abbreviation in the suffix .com.  Most countries have organizations to regulate and allocate domain names.  The USA, being first in the field, is not required to show a country identifier, but just .com (a commercial domain), .net (network), .org (organization), .edu (educational) or .gov (government).  These are just a few in the ever-increasing list of available suffixes created to meet growing demand.  For a domain registered in another country, the country identifier is inserted after the domain type indicator, as in www.stereosociety.co.uk. 

Within Web sites are sub-pages.  These are arranged at the site in layers.  You arrive at the home page, by accessing www.stereosociety.com, then move on as you wish.  Each page has its own 'universal resource locator', or URL, which is in the form sprawl.html  (in this precise case the page presenting the Sprawl  album on the stereosociety site).  Pages are most usefully accessed by linking through the home page, but they do not have to be linked from anywhere to be accessed; the URL does it for you regardless.  Thanks to this elegantly simple structure, every page on the Web has a unique URL.

E mail originates from your local (client) computer.  You write it and then send it to an address such as info@stereosociety.com.  In this case, info is the name of the addressee, and the @ indicates the domain, which is allocated to a specific computer where the addressee's E mail will be delivered for their later collection.