![]() ![]() ![]() Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet records Blum’s quest to uncover what few of us consider and even fewer understand - the jarringly tactile, material nuts and bolts of an intricate architectural system we tend to see as an abstract, amorphous blob. That’s precisely the unsettling realization at which Andrew Blum arrived after a squirrel in his Brooklyn backyard nibbled through the cable connection of his internet, the internet, causing it to falter. And yet, while we may ponder its cultural impact, its biases, and its economics, the internet - despite our metaphors of clouds and information superhighways, and our concept of a “wireless” web - is a thoroughly physical thing. Do you ever stop to think what happens when a web page, like this one, manifests as digital text and image on your screen to transmit ideas between someone else’s brain and your own across time and space - and how it all works, in practical terms? The very thought of this physical underbelly of our information ecosystem feels strange and uncomfortable, as if betraying our dichotomous culture of “virtual” vs. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |