Understanding how information is decoupled from matter is already a difficult topic to grasp, let alone when you are a German mother from the 1870s attempting to send your son on the front line a telegram of soup.
To understand centralised, decentralised and distributed network systems, you can still use the example of sending soup.
Centralised systems have a single-centre which could be a human operator. So when sending soup a human operator would need to process it, which means other users could access the soup and also the German mother’s information could be stored.
Decentralised systems have multiple hubs, so if the telegraph operator couldn’t come to work there would still be back up operators to send soup.
A distributed system has no centre so the German mother could send the soup knowing that no one would come in contact with the soup or store information about her or her son.
Moral of the story is you can’t send soup by telegraph.
Bees and Bells 