Making Meaning: Tubes

Our second book that we had to read for our class is a book called "Tubes" by Andrew Blum. Overall the book was not very engaging and it took me a lot of concentration to pick it up and read it. It just seemed dry to me or something, or maybe I just didn't like to read it because it was a textbook. Although it was interesting for someone to talk about what the internet is like outside of your home. Andrew asks the question:" When your internet cable leaves your living room, where does it go?" And Andrew goes around the world to find out this question. I found it very interesting that he went and saw some of the tech at Google. When I was little I always thought the internet was this magical thing that my dad brought into our home and it would always be there. Then I got older and learned what a router was, and I still just thought of it as a box with the internet just stored in it. I never really thought it had a location or storage like a computer does, and I'm not really sure why. When Andrew actually sees parts of the internet and just gazes upon blinking machinery, it's kind of like pulling the curtain to look at the wizard of oz. 
One part I did enjoy was on page 158 where he talks about how the routers he saw in Austin were like the building blocks of the internet. He did paint a good picture of that the hardware looked like.I think the fact that the book was so much like a novel made me not really treat it like a textbook.
One thing that I liked about Pattern on the Stone and not Tubes is that POTS felt more like a textbook for beginners in computers and less like a novel. It explained a lot of good concepts to know and had great examples to learn from. It had a good pace and did not leave a lot to question. Tubes felt a lot like a quest, and I'm not saying I don't enjoy a good quest, I am just not one to enjoy textbooks. I'm not saying the book is all bad though. The quest for the internet is very interesting, and again it seemed odd to me at first because of the strange idea that the internet had a location.

To see someone else's opinion on this book I looked to the internet for a review on Tubes and came upon Science Blogs and an article entitled "Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet."

The author, Claire Evans, really enjoyed the book and Blum's quest to find out just exactly where the internet lives. She said in her article "Tubes might have well been called “Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About the Internet But Were Afraid to Ask.” " which I can agree with. Evans comments that this book should be required reading for anyone, just so we can have a basic understanding of the Internet and how it works. I may not say that it should be required reading but I could see a lot of people learning from this and being really interested in it. I would recommend this book to anyone who has time to just sit down and read about the internet.