On a visit to The Science Museum in London back in 2008, I was fortunate enough to stumble upon a mesmerising exhibit situated in a dark corner of the first floor. What's sad is that as I sit and watch in awe of the amazing world portrayed in the hundreds on miniature displays, I am aware of other visitors that enter the room and leave moments later without giving a brief consideration as to what it is they are witnessing.

The Science Museum is a fun and fantastical day out for anybody. Over the past few years, I've visited the museum alone, with my wife and also with the in-laws. It's always enjoyable, the ever changing exhibits providing an amazement of education and despite numerous visits I am still left for lack of words at the interactive elements provided throughout the floors.

Despite all of this, my favourite area of the museum is not easy to find. It's not well advertised and for those that do stumble across its home, well, at first it can seem a little dull. The exhibit that I have come to adore with such great interest is Listening Post and I was truly disappointed to learn this weekend that the exhibits sparkle will come to an end as we welcome in 2012. With this in mind, I would encourage anybody with an interest in the Internet, be it for work or play, to take a day out of their busy schedule to visit The Science Museum and to spend a moment of their lifetime to experience the Internet in the truly unique way that only Listening Post can portray it.

Many a time have I tried to describe the wonderment of Listening Post to friends and family but I can never find a way to justly recreate the awe and the atmosphere, the overall experience. I will attempt to describe the experience to you in my own words but first, here is how the exhibit is described by its founding artists;

Listening Post is a 'dynamic portrait' of online communication, displaying uncensored fragments of text, sampled in real-time, from public internet chatrooms and bulletin boards. Artists Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin have divided their work into seven separate ‘scenes’ akin to movements in a symphony. Each scene has its own ‘internal logic’, sifting, filtering and ordering the text fragments in different ways.

By pulling text quotes from thousands of unwitting contributors' postings, Listening Post allows you to experience an extraordinary snapshot of the internet and gain a great sense of the humanity behind the data. The artwork is world renowned as a masterpiece of electronic and contemporary art and a monument to the ways we find to connect with each other and express our identities online.

One of the most difficult components to describe to people is the environment in which the experience takes place. It is very hard to imagine it simply from hearing it described and that's simply because the user interface is so unbelievably simple and yet so complex at the same time. With that in mind, I have included an image from The Science Museum's website below that will help to set the scene.

What makes Listening Post so wonderful is that it provides its guests with an alternative window to the Internet, a viewpoint which we rarely step back and observe. As a child of the 80's, I grew up through my early years without the Internet. Widespread access to the Internet started to appear when I was in my early teens although we'd had access to a restricted world wide web at school for a few years. It must have been around 1998 when we got access to the Internet at home for the first time, through a 56.6Kbps dial-up connection to AOL. Many of you will have scoffed at the mention of AOL, I certainly cringed as I remembered those days, but this was my first independent experience with the Internet and the start of a very exciting relationship with technology that most of us share today.

One of the very first experiences I can remember of the web, and AOL specifically, is that opportunities that it offered to chat with people virtually anywhere in the world. It was amazing, as a teen, to sit on the PC and be chatting in real time with people from either coast of the USA, Canada, Australia and beyond. In time, this evolved into matches of online pool at Yahoo! Games. As the internet has continued to mature, online chat, at least in real time, has started to fade out. This is due in part to the growth of online communities and social networks and also, somewhat sadly, due to the threat to people's privacy that has become apparent.

Maybe it's my fond memories of the chatroom that have led to my love of Listening Post. In simple terms, its creators have written a computer program that crawls the internet and harvests unsuspecting surfers' chat dialogue from the public chatrooms that still exist and the ever popular internet forums. The collected data is then interwoven into a mellow patchwork performance of stinted sentences that is as raw and honest as its author intended.

As the audience sits on the contemporary benches of the dark auditorium, waiting in anticipation, the relaxing music begins and the familiar clak-clakety-clak of a train station timetable board begins the show. The miniature black LED screens begin to light up and glow an alluring green, filling with words, phrases and abbreviations. The computerised voice begins to read a selection of the hundreds of phrases flashing across the displays, "I am 17...I am Mexican...I am 21/M/UK...", nothing unusual so far. But as we continue, it doesn't take long for a familiar tone to creep into the tale, "I am horny...I am looking for a hot chat...I am going to kill him".

The show that we are witnessing is pulling a selection of chatter containing the opening expression "I am..." and it very quickly becomes clear that the feed is uncensored and not only that, it reaffirms and reality that the internet is 90% sex and violence. With this in mind, don't fear that Listening Post is some sort of sick wonder. You have to see it to believe it. Altogether, there are seven separate shows that cycle through over a thirty minute period and each performance is totally unique. They'll spark intrigue, laughter and bemusement as you learn new abbreviations and watch the chatter of the web unfold, live, before your very eyes.

It's unlikely that I'll get the chance to visit The Science Museum again this year and so I may have experienced my final showing of the show. I do not know what the artists have planned for the exhibit once its time at The Science Museum draws to an end but I hope that it will live on somewhere so that we can continue to enjoy its wonderful aura. Whatever its future, I'd like to thank Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen for sharing their work with us and would urge you to visit the exhibit on the first floor of The Science Museum and witness it for yourself before it closes at the end of December 2011.