User:Roelroscama/compilation of thougths 1st year

Compilation of thoughts from first year

Started with questions regarding perceived contradictions within world wide web rhetoric. The internet is perceived as having certain promises, features it is lauded for, at the same time it shows us different realities. Especially the concept of a 'world wide web' versus the fact that most of the traffic and services are american. There is indeed the promise to connect to the world, and surf around it while in practice most things (now) happen on US clouds.

How can we have such positive liberatory notions about a technology that is essentially borne from US militaristic interests? Possible answer is to be found in the counter culture and the 'californian ideology' that emerged from it, as a dominant model of framing computer networks in a solely 'liberatory' and emancipatory way. This way of thinking eventually got embedded into the dominant rhetoric surrounding the internet.

Having read The Victorian Internet, on electromagnetic telegraphy, it's inception, spread, use and the surrounding rhetorics that suggests telegraphy as an analogue to the internet. It becomes very tempting to read the beginning of the not in the typical story of 70's darpa etc., the whole rhetoric of the internet as the unique invention from 70's california. But rather as the latest iteration of an ongoing process that started in 1850s colonial europe. In this sense the internet is just telegraphy with higher bandwidth.

In this regard the visual resemblance between maps of submarine fibre-optic cables and submarine telegraphy cables is not only striking but perhaps also revealing. The routes seem to be almost the same, with a heavy focus on hubs in western countries with some of the strongest links between european countries and their former colonies.