He identifies hidden parts of our global network structure and sheds some light on an industry that is usually obscure. His story of following the tubes from his house to find the Internet is interesting. While Blum is no engineer, I think he make wise choices about how to frame his book. Blum avoids technical talk, I didn't have to use much of what I learned getting an ancient Network+ certification to follow him. What follows is a interesting and personable exploration of global networking. Andrew Blum sets out with a project: follow the cable out of his house back to the physical structure of the Internet.
This is a solid book with good journalism about a piece of our information infrastructure that is vital, but poorly understood and frequently ignored. Like Tracy Kidder’s classic The Soul of a New Machine or Tom Vanderbilt’s recent bestseller Traffic, Tubes combines deep reporting and lucid explanation into an engaging quest to understand the everyday world we live in. You can map it, you can smell it, and you can even visit it-and that’s just what Blum does in Tubes.įrom the room in Berkeley where the Internet flickered to life to the busiest streets in Manhattan as new fiber optic cable is laid down from the coast of Portugal as a 10,000-mile undersea cable just two thumbs’ wide is laid down to connect Europe and West Africa to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where Google, Microsoft and Facebook have built monumental data centers-Blum visits them all to chronicle the dramatic story of the Internet’s development, explain how it all works, and capture the spirit of the place/ It fills enormous buildings, converges in some places and avoids others, and it flows through tubes under ground, up in the air, and under the oceans all over the world. After all, as Blum writes, the Internet exists: for all the talk of the “placelessness” of our digital age, the Internet is as fixed in real, physical places as any railroad or telephone ever was. When former Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska famously described the Internet as “a series of tubes,” he seemed hopelessly, foolishly trapped in an old way of knowing the world. But connected to what, exactly? In Tubes, journalist Andrew Blum takes readers on a fascinating journey to find out. An engaging, narrative tour behind the scenes of our everyday lives to see the dark beating heart of the Internet itself.
0 kommentar(er)
