“Tubes: Behind the scenes at the Internet”, by Android Blum, is “a book about the people and places that make our virtual world actual.”

The Internet is all around us and many of us spend much of our time in this virtual connected world and yet we cannot see it or touch it – or can we?

For us to get a sense of the internet as a physical presence we can look at our computer, or mobile device, and follow the communication back through our local environment. Perhaps we could trace this back to some kind of hub, router or wireless gateway somewhere, either at work, home, or some other place, and continue to follow this connection backwards until a router hits a phone line or we find some other mechanism for connecting to the public “network”.

But what happens next? What happens if we trace the path all the way back? Would we find a physical manifestation of “the internet” – the source? Or is the internet already distributed all around us? And if so, what does it look like? Where does our information sleep? How does it get there? And how does it get back?

“In April 2011, a seventy-five year old woman deprived Armenia of its internet access when she sliced through a buried cable with her garden spade.”

In this soon to be released book Andrew Blum sets out to discover where this thing we know as the “internet” really exists and takes a peek behind the scenes from the tubes of light to the data centres and people who make our online experience a reality.

“Tubes: Behind the scenes at the Internet” is due for release 7th June 2012, in both paperback and eBook format. Watch out the for full review coming soon…