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Book Review: Blum's deep dive into the depths of the internet
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With each chapter, Blum systematically visits the structures and places that make the internet work. (Shutterstock/*)
E
very day we use the internet. Updating Snapchat, posting pictures on Facebook, googling life’s difficult (or very easy) questions, searching for recipes, researching the answers to your homework, watching a Korean drama on YouTube, checking maps to get to your destination…the list goes on.
If you were from ancient Rome and were dropped into the modern world, you’d think the internet functions on magic. Click a button and pages appear. Click that button and a video loads, the screen flashes and sounds emerge. As a modern man, you know that the internet is powered by electricity and that pieces of data go through wires hitting supercomputers blah blah blah. Wait… is that it? How can we know the internet’s possibilities if we don’t know its parts?
Ted Stevens, the late senator from Alaska, once famously described the internet as “a series of tubes”. And while he’s not really wrong, there is a lot more to the internet and its complicated set-up. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet is tech journalist Andrew Blum’s fascinating journey into the depths of the internet. By stripping down the internet’s virtual, untouchable characteristics and pinpointing its infrastructure, Blum allows readers to understand the internet’s physicality and enormity.
(Read also: Book Review: When technology takes over human life)
To say that Blum’s book is a travel book is not wrong. Not unlike Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Blum’s book goes to real places on the map: their sights, sounds, storied histories, minute details and the people who live there. With each chapter, Blum systematically visits the structures and places that make the internet work. And his career as a journalist comes in handy, because he records such vividly detailed descriptions of the large centers that house connections and vast amounts of data. And when he heads to areas to witness for himself the undersea cables that tie the continents together digitally, you can almost visualize it in your head. And with each place he ticks off his list, a bigger, brighter picture emerges of the internet.
Blum doesn’t seek to discuss the philosophy of the internet, or try to say what it is or isn’t. It’s a simple quest: to find out where all the information comes from and goes to. And at the end of it all, this book definitely shatters the illusion that the internet is one big, seamless, omnipotent presence.
If you’re an aspiring network programmer, you must read this book to learn the internet’s intricacies. If you’re a layman, you must read this book to appreciate the rough edges behind the glitzy front. (kes)
Click here to read this book.
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Title: Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
Author: Andrew Blum
Published: 2012
Publisher: HarperCollins
Category: Science and technology
Pages: 317
Reviewed by: Natalie Pang
