BookThing #7: Tubes

I read Andrew Blum's Tubes for this month's Nebraska Learns 2.0 BookThing. The author decided to visit the Internet, offline. He went around the world, looking at routers, cables, Internet exchanges, and data centers. We may commonly think of the Internet as a "virtual" space, not physically real. However, Blum's journey vividly illustrates that the Internet is neither nowhere nor everywhere, but most definitely somewhere. The fiber optic lines follow real-world paths, aboveground, underground, and undersea. They converge in real-world nexuses, not unlike the hub system used for air travel. The data you store in the "cloud" is situated in a real, physical location, possibly in Oregon, where Blum visited data centers operated by Google and Facebook (and had very, very different experiences at the two places). Blum saw enough of the Internet's infrastructure that he became consciously aware of the exact geographic path traveled by his data when he sent an email. The Internet was built the same way roads and buildings were built--by people with tools and heavy equipment digging up the landscape--and this book lets you meet these people and see how they work.

I'll confess that while I was intellectually aware that the Internet was made up of physical cables and servers, I never gave much thought to actually where these were or how they worked. The Internet was, in my mind, an amorphous blob floating "out there." I've always imagined that the greatest threat to the Internet was from hackers, viruses, and other malicious nasties operating in the virtual arena. This book enlightened me to the ways earthquakes and catastrophic weather events could take out huge chunks of the Internet by severing major fiber lines or knocking out an exchange center. On a more prosaic level, the physicality of the Internet helps explain why one web page loads slowly and another quickly, or why a page that loads slowly for you loads quickly for your neighbor--and the next page loads quickly for you but slow for them--if you have different Internet service providers.

From a library standpoint, this knowledge could be useful for troubleshooting Internet troubles. Internet slow? Has your nearest Internet exchange been hit by a storm or quake? Want to store data in the cloud? Where is it, really? Which state? Which country? Whose servers? Is it secure, both physically and virtually? Good things to be aware of, and good things to help make library patrons aware of. I recommend this book for anyone who wants to look under the hood of the Internet.

BookThing #6: I Live in the Future and Here’s How it Works

In this month's NLC BookThing I Live in the Future & Here's How it Works, Nick Bilton describes the massive technological shift that is affecting all aspects of society, even down to the way people's brains process information. Even the casual observer can see that just about every traditional hardcopy media (print books and periodicals, music CDs, DVDs, etc.) is in sharp decline, and their digital counterparts are growing explosively. Bilton looks at how this affects the way we consume media, and how that in turns affects the way our brains process information. Instead of reading a long book or watching a long movie with undivided attention, people are increasingly multitasking. The reading of an ebook might be frequently interrupted by visits to various hyperlinked articles, videos, discussions, etc. The watching of a movie might be punctuated with status updates, text conversations, pausing to look things up, etc. This shift toward what some call attention deficit disorder and Bilton calls "richochet working" has implications for how young people about to enter the workforce will do their jobs. Likely, even industries that aren't involved with traditional media (books, music, etc.) will have to adapt to the changing workstyle of their employees.

Libraries are already shifting from physical resources to virtual. This book just reinforces that we have to, if anything, accelerate this process in order to satisfy the digital natives. Libraries will need to integrate better with the Internet to serve our users. Cloud-based integrated library systems might be one way of getting our services out where our users are.

Of course, we shouldn't neglect those patrons who are on the trailing end of this transition. A lot of people come to the library because they don't have access to the Internet at home, and many of them still need hardcopy resources. The book quoted William Gibson: "The future is already here--it is just unevenly distributed." Libraries have to bridge the gap, serving both users who are immersed in this new Net order and users who have never touched a computer. (Yes, people like that still exist, and they still deserve respect and high-quality service.) For librarians, reaching both ends of the spectrum and everything in between might seem like tightrope walking on razor wire.