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Title: Tubes

Subtitle: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

Author: Andrew Blum

Narrator: Andrew Blum

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-29-12

Publisher: HarperAudio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 193 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Technology

Publisher's Summary:

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 10,000 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 best seller 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.

Members Reviews:

Don't listen to this while driving

The author has turned what is the most important, complex and useful structure of our times, the internet, into a boring and dull book. He is a shining example of my most authors should not read their own material. He reads in a monotone with no vocal variety to make his subject marginally interesting. If you are prone to sleep while driving do not listen to this book in the car. You may get in an accident.

Make no mistake the material could make a fascinating book, just not this one. The author tells of the first communication between two people over the fledgling internet. It should have all the drama of the first words between Bell and Watson but unfortunately it does not. This is described in the same dull manner that the author describes the journey to the various iconic internet places and buildings. The train, countryside, streets, signs and other tiny, inconsequential details are minutely described.

The book, actually, could be mislabeled.