My initial thought (that I am sure everyone on the list had) was what is understanding? Legal? Social? Technical? Hardware? But I think the suggestions so far are good. I would add perhaps you might want some pictures — a friend of mine, Shuli Hallak, is a professional photographer of infrastructures. Some of her work focuses on the internet. This way you can have images in your mind about what in the world we are all talking about in terms of its actual concrete physicality, not just the more abstract social or technical concepts. Terms like “the cloud” are easy to understand (for the cloud, at least, it signals that you don’t need to understand whatever it is but it’s out there somewhere — Mosco has a good recent book about it, “To The Cloud”), but what does it look like? Since vision is such an important part of who we are, this is not a bad idea I don’t think. Here are the four sub-sections of her website with internet photos. Also, mouse-over each image if you want for some descriptive text. Facebook, server farms…. http://shulihallak.com/fb/ Subsea cable deployment from a ship. (I think she was on the ship the entire time for the deployment, several days.) http://shulihallak.com/subsea/ Fiber deployment in NYC: http://shulihallak.com/fiber/ Interconnection facilities: http://shulihallak.com/interconnect/ All her photos are pretty cool, the cargo ones (not internet) are really impressive imho: http://shulihallak.com/cargo/ I believe she actually rode on board for the entire trip, whatever it was exactly. How cool is that! She’s amazing. -Nat ------------------------------- Nathaniel Poor, Ph.D. http://github.com/natpoor http://natpoor.blogspot.com/ http://sites.google.com/site/natpoor/ http://www.underwood-institute.org/
On Nov 14, 2017, at 1:44 AM, Zoetanya Sujon <zoe.sujon@gmail.com> wrote:
Good morning AoIR,
I am looking for up-to-date resources for understanding the infrastructure of the internet, including the role of mobile and telephone networks in that infrastructure.
As a starting point, I've looked at Janet Abbate's 'Inventing the Internet' (2000) and Kurose and Ross's 'Computer Networking' (2013). I tend to focus on the social/cultural aspects of the web, so this is a little outside my own area of focus, and I fear I may be missing some basics.
Any recommendations gratefully received!
____________________________ Dr Zoetanya Sujon
Senior Lecturer in Media Theory
Secondment in Academic and Educational Development School of Creative and Liberal Arts
Regent's University London, Regent's Park, Inner Circle, London NW1 4NS 020 3075 6180 | sujonz@regents.ac.uk <https://mail.regents.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?C=V91qkBM7U02Ve7tJXV85VcAHD1pxP9QIi1a0pohmb22R3CzV9vo2Nyk4_X_ebhT8ByRUA51o37s.&URL=mailto%3asujonz%40regents.ac.uk> | @jetsumgerl <https://twitter.com/jetsumgerl?lang=en> | Blog: <https://mail.regents.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?C=V91qkBM7U02Ve7tJXV85VcAHD1pxP9QIi1a0pohmb22R3CzV9vo2Nyk4_X_ebhT8ByRUA51o37s.&URL=https%3a%2f%2fsujonz.wordpress.com%2f> https://sujonz.wordpress.com/ -- 'You are marvellous. The Gods wait to delight in you.' ('The Laughing Heart' by Charles Bukowski). _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/