How do you see the Internet? Ingrid Burrington writes,

Over the past two years, I've asked a lot of people this question. It's a question often met with confusion or requests for clarification. Do I mean "What do you think about the Internet, like in the grand scheme of things?" or "How do you think the Internet works?" or "How do you access the Internet?" Really, I'm asking all three.

She suggests we take the last question first: How do you access the internet? Well, on a computer, sure, or more commonly your phone. But what happens when you load a website? It all starts with a request to a network.



Which network? It depends on where you are. Here in our classroom, this starts with the Eduroam wifi where this computer is currently wirelessly connected via radio waves. The next hop might be a wifi router that is sending out these signals. That router is connected to another router, which connected to another, and so on and so on. But where physically are these routers? Where are the cables that connect them and what happens next?

There is a pretty amazing website which clarifies some of this — geotraceroute.com shows the geographic locations of all the servers (and routers) that a particular web requests bounces around between en route to answering the website request. Here’s the path that my request to princeton.edu from where I am sitting right now (Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, Italy):



Let’s move on to the second question: "How do you think the Internet works?

“I have no idea, maybe black magic.”

That’s fair. But a little information can illuminate an answer that is surprisingly concrete. Every internet request that comes from our classroom travels over a cable buried underneath Nassau Street, just outside the window



We are going to go for a walk together now and see what we can see.

Continues in class ...