The book Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet is about the real, physical reality of the Internet. The thesis and main message on Blum's writing is to focus the reader on the fact that everything we do online travels through a series of Tubes that connect us all online. There are Tubes that connect hundreds of thousands of miles, underwater and on land, and there a buildings filled with series of tubes. There are tubes and wires underwater that connect London and New York and Frankfurt to each other. These cities are home to vast data warehouses where most of the information online travels to. Blum notes in his book that, "I have confirmed with my own eyes that the Internet is many things, in many places. But one thing it most certainly is, nearly everywhere, is, in fact, a series of tubes." To effectively illustrate and proves his argument, Andrew Blum visits these vast data warehouses in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and London and giant Internet exchanges where multiple networks meet. He even describes the scent of the physical Internet to us as, "an odd, but distinctive mix of industrial strength air-conditioners and the ozone released by capacitors." While in London, Blum even goes inside a tube. He also witnesses a technician fusing together undersea cables that have been pulled to the surface. He is writing to us these accounts of his experiences to let us realize, know, and understand that a lot of work goes into maintaining these series of Tubes.
In an article in the reader, "The Internet" by Martin Campbell-Kelly et al, he discusses the Internet as a whole. Campbell-Kelly writes, "In the early 1990s the Internet became big news. In the fall of 1990 there were just 313,000 computers attached to the Internet; five years later the number was approaching 10 million, and by the end of 2000 the number had exceeded 100 million... The Internet gives computer users the ability to communicate, to gain access to information sources, and to conduct business." This writing is important and essential to understand that the Internet rapidly took off during the 1990s and beyond. No one understood the inner-workings of the Internet and how it worked, but all that mattered to users was what it could accomplish. This book explores those "inner-workings" and how everything actually connects to each other and how there is a physical cable and network that connects us to the Internet.
Another point found within the reader that backs up Blum's argument is in Van Dijk's "Social Structure" within The Network Society. Van Dijk writes about a concept known as Increasing selectivity of space and time. "The enormous growth in telephony and the explosive increase of demand for data communication already show that more value is being placed on bridging distances of space and time. Nobody will deny the extreme relevance of (clock) time in the most advanced nerve centers of ICT, the stock markets. Hesitating for a second or failing to make a fast connection to another financial market can mean the difference between profit and loss." This concept of making a "fast connection" is relevant to Blum's book in that one has to learn what it takes to make and understand what a connection is at all, let alone a fast one. All of these connections and bridging distances of space and time is all thanks to the Internet. Blum highlights the actual physical Internet and the networks connecting to each other to make those "connections" possible, which will then in turn either make or break someones day (in the stock marketing world).
In this video above, Andrew Blum is explaining where the center of the internet is. Blum says that there is not exactly one single center, but fewer than people would think. In his opinion, there is about a handful of places where the actual physical router connects with others and multiple networks.
