Tubes : a journey to the center of the Internet
(Book)

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Published
New York, NY : Ecco, [2012].
ISBN
9780061994937, 0061994936
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Batavia Public Library District - Adult Nonfiction004.67809 BLUOn Shelf
Bedford Park Public Library District - Stacks004.678 BluOn Shelf
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Published
New York, NY : Ecco, [2012].
Format
Book
Physical Desc
294 pages ; 24 cm
Language
English
ISBN
9780061994937, 0061994936

Notes

Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Description
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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Citations

APA Citation, 7th Edition (style guide)

Blum, A. (2012). Tubes: a journey to the center of the Internet (First edition.). Ecco.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation, 17th Edition (style guide)

Blum, Andrew. 2012. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. Ecco.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities (Notes and Bibliography) Citation, 17th Edition (style guide)

Blum, Andrew. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet Ecco, 2012.

MLA Citation, 9th Edition (style guide)

Blum, Andrew. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet First edition., Ecco, 2012.

Note! Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy. Citation formats are based on standards as of August 2021.

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