Tubes (Paperback)

Andrew Blum

ISBN 10: 014104909X / ISBN 13: 9780141049090

Published by Penguin Books Ltd, London, 2013

About this Item

Paperback. The Internet. Home to the most important and intimate aspects of our lives. Our careers, our relationships, our selves, all of them are out there - online. So. . . where is that exactly? And who's in charge again? And what if it breaks?Tubes- Behind the Scenes at the Internet by Andrew Blum is.'Utterly engrossing. The year's most original and stimulating 'travel' book. Even the most geek-wary of readers will enjoy' Independent'Entertaining and illuminating. Excels at rooting the Internet in real-world locations. Full of memorable images that make its complex architecture easier to comprehend' ObserverThe Internet. Home to the most important and intimate aspects of our lives. Our careers, our relationships, our selves, all of them are out there - online. So . where is that exactly? And who's in charge again? And what if it breaks?In Tubes Andrew Blum takes us on a gripping backstage tour of the real but hidden world of the Internet, introducing us to the remarkable clan of insiders and eccentrics who own, design and run it everyday. He uncovers the secret data warehouses where our online selves are stored, peels back the wires that transport us across the globe, reveals its mammoth hubs and surprising alley-ways, explaining what the Internet actually is, where it is, how it got there - and, yes, what happens when it breaks.'An engaging reminder that, cyber-Utopianism aside, the Internet is as much a thing of flesh and steel as any industrial-age lumber mill or factory. An excellent introduction to the nuts and bolts of how exactly it all works and a timely antidote to oft-repeated abstractions about "cyberspace" or "cloud computing" Economist'Makes hard-to-grasp concepts easy to understand, even obvious. The history, in particular, is one of the best and most memorable I have ever read' New Scientist'A Quixotic and winning book with a knack for bundling packets of data into memorable observations. This valuable book leaves you with its share of unsettling visions, but there are comic ones too' The New York Times'For a full understanding of the Internet on every level, this book is a must-read' Techzone'A great, playful, wondrous read' ArsTechnica'Blum is perhaps the millennial generation's John McPhee, chronicling an arcane journey of deep relevance to everyday life. For non-techies, the book is a very accessible revelation' Forbes'All too awesome to behold. Andrew Blum's fascinating book demystifies the earthly geography of this most ethereal terra incognita' Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein'Compelling and profound. You will never open an e-mail in quite the same way again' Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic'One of our best writers. A compelling story of an altogether new realm where the virtual world meets the physical' Paul Goldberger, New Yorker'The Internet really IS a series of tubes! Who knew?' David Pogue, The New York TimesAndrew Blum writes about architecture, infrastructure and technology for many publications, including the New Yorker, The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Slate and Popular Science. He is a correspondent for Wired, a contributing editor to Metropolis and lives in his hometown of New York City. Takes us on a backstage tour of the real but hidden world of the Internet, introducing us to the remarkable clan of insiders and eccentrics who own, design and run it everyday. This book uncovers the secret data warehouses where our online selves are stored, peels back the wires that transport us across the globe. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9780141049090

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Tubes (Paperback)
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd, London
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 014104909X
• ISBN 13: 9780141049090
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

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From the Back Cover

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.