• What do you know about the Internet?
• Who uses the Internet?

"If one is to foster an understanding and awareness of how the social and the political are not external to technology, then it is important to understand how the technological is in some sense isomorphic to the social and the political

This book - Protocol - consistently makes a case for a material understanding of technology... This type of materialist media studies shows how the question "how does it work?" is also a question "whom does it work for.?" In short, the technical specs matter, ontologically and politically."

Think of other 'networks'

Internet Traffic

• Text (e-mail/data)
• Image
• Audio
• Video

Spinning vinyl under a microscope

Why don't we hear the abrupt transitions?

In digital audio the most common sampling rates are 44.1 kHz, 48 kHz, 96 kHz and 192 kHz.

• Analog
  
  • continuous signal
  • noise -> signal loss and distortion (cannot distinguish between error and data)
  • imperfect copy
  
  
• Digital
  
  • discrete signal
  • magic of mathematics
  • noise/error -> error detection/error correction
  • indefinite faithful copies
  • compression

What does silence on a telephone network sound like?

%ifconfig -a 

to look at MTU (packet) size (byte = 8 bits) and available interfaces

• You don't have the map of the subway system
• Conductor on certain line will know all the station on that line (eg. conductor on yellow will know all the stations on yellow line and the connecting lines)

Midtown to Canal St (Blue line)

Navigating packets to its destination is called "routing"

Imagine the subway system with each line (red, blue, brown...etc) independently administered. Each line knows about its own stations and where it connects with other lines.

• Nodes (=stations)
  
• Routers(=transfer stations).
  
  Any node that has more than two network interfaces can be a router (Just like any train station with more than two lines can be a transfer station).
  

My computer -> www.sfc.keio.ac.jp

My computer ---> router in studio art building closet ---> router at edge of Reed network ---> router at network provider...

• Routers
  
• Scope:
  • Routers know a lot about its own network. (eg. router in the Reed network knows where every computer is in its own network).
  • Routers have limited knowledge outside of its network. (eg. if a packet is going east coast forward it to network B, if it is going to the west coast forward it to network C).
  
  
  
• Best-effort:
  • If one network is down, it will try another route.
  • If a particular network is congested, routers may forward your packet to another network.
  • Routers are allowed to drop (give up on) your packets if it's too busy.

Looking up routing table using a UNIX command
%netstat -r

The Internet is a network of networks, each with different administrative domain

What are the strengths/weaknesses of the Internet system as compared from the telephone network?

- Resilient
- No central control
- Best effort
- Small inexpensive lower quality links that are allowed to fail
- Military Effort (ARPA) in a Cold War environment
- Often mentioned as designed to survive a nuclear attack.
- Resilient against physical attacks. Perhaps not so to virtual/cyber attacks.

What are the questions one could ask through this diagram?

from A prehistory of the Cloud (pX)
"situate a network... within the same epistemic space as somehting that constatnly fluctuates and is impossible to know"