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When your Internet cable leaves your living room, where does it go? Almost everything about our day-to-day lives—and the broader scheme of human culture—can be found on the Internet. But what is it physically? And where is it really? Our mental map of the network is as blank as the map of the ocean that Columbus carried on his first Atlantic voyage. The Internet, its material nuts and bolts, is an unexplored territory. Until now.
In Tubes, journalist Andrew Blum goes inside the Internet's physical infrastructure and flips on the lights, revealing an utterly fresh look at the online world we think we know. It is a shockingly tactile realm of unmarked compounds, populated by a special caste of engineer who pieces together our networks by hand; where glass fibers pulse with light and creaky telegraph buildings, tortuously rewired, become communication hubs once again. From the room in Los Angeles where the Internet first flickered to life to the caverns beneath Manhattan where new fiber-optic cable is buried; from the coast of Portugal, where a ten-thousand-mile undersea cable just two thumbs wide connects Europe and Africa, to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have built monumental data centers—Blum chronicles the dramatic story of the Internet's development, explains how it all works, and takes the first-ever in-depth look inside its hidden monuments.
This is a book about real places on the map: their sounds and smells, their storied pasts, their physical details, and the people who live there. For all the talk of the "placelessness" of our digital age, the Internet is as fixed in real, physical spaces as the railroad or telephone. You can map it and touch it, and you can visit it. Is the Internet in fact "a series of tubes" as Ted Stevens, the late senator from Alaska, once famously described it? How can we know the Internet's possibilities if we don't know its parts?
Like Tracy Kidder's classic The Soul of a New Machine or Tom Vanderbilt's recent bestseller Traffic, Tubes combines on-the-ground reporting and lucid explanation into an engaging, mind-bending narrative to help us understand the physical world that underlies our digital lives.
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Blum recounts the dramatic story of the Internet, its development, and how it interacts
****"We are all connected now. But connected to what, exactly? In Tubes, journalist Andrew Blum takes readers on an engaging narrative tour behind the scenes of our everyday lives to see the heart of the Internet itself."--Andrew Blum*Like Tom Vanderbilt's bestseller Traffic, Tubes is a creative explanation into an engaging, mind-bending narrative that utilizes professional on-site reporting into the Internet's physical infrastructure to help the lay reader, and Internet browser understand the physical world that forms the foundation of our daily digital experience. This is an account of the physical details, of a virtual world, of places on the cyber map: the people who develop and control its ducts, like the railroad tracks, or telephone fiber optic conductor bundles.In Tubes, journalist Andrew Blum write with a rational passion, revealing a brisk fresh view of the Cyber world, that everyday users may think they figuratively understand. A...
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May 3, 2012
(Kellia on Calvary, Carolina, USA) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 4
Excellent Travelogue of The Internet Infrastructure
The author, a tech writer takes us on a idiosyncratic but fascinating tour of the Internet's physical infrastructure. This is definitely a story that needs to be told and is told well in this travelogue that attempts some of the same kind of intriguing description of technology for layman made famous by "The Soul of A New Machine". My sole criticism of this fascinating tale, based upon the preliminary reviewers' copy I received from Amazon Vine, is one that can be partially rectified in the final edition with the proper diagrams and graphics; the story of the Internet's physical infrastructure and topography must make reference to its architecture and physical layout in a way that is understandable as a whole "mapped" hierarchy, and network layout. Because this book attempts to describe to the layman, one of mankind's greatest technological and architectural achievements and make it understandable to the layman they must understand something of its architecture as a whole and as a...
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May 2, 2012
(Philadelphia, PA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4
Interesting, But Definitely For Techies
After a squirrel living in his backyard chewed through wiring connecting his computer to the internet, journalist Andrew Blum became curious -- where, he asked himself, do all the computers, cables and routers 'live' that physically power the internet? And who runs the companies that maintain them?This question was covered years ago in a series of fascinating Wired magazine articles written by novelist Bruce Sterling, so I was eager to read Blum's account. Blum traveled from one city to another, looking at inconspicuous office buildings filled with equipment, talking to executives about underwater ocean cables that are thousands of miles long, and tries to give the reader a series of mental pictures of how the internet actually 'works.'The book is interesting, but his efforts to draw word pictures of complex equipment, how the internet functions, and the engineers who maintain it are somewhat rambling and disorderly, and he assumes a level of knowledge on the...
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May 5, 2012
(Washington, DC/New York) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3
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