Before taking a course called Ghosts in Shells? Virtuality and Embodiment from Passing to the Posthuman with Marisa Parham, I had a relatively unquestioned idea of the Internet as a nebulous, mystical creation. I fell into the language often used to describe it: “cloud”-like, unlimited, intangible. Think here of the many images of “cloud-based” services that we are surrounded with:

Even in moments when I considered the internet as a “physical” space, I was still thinking of it in abstractions not too different from those of a cloud. I was imagining it as a world of suspended time and reality, much as it was visually depicted in the episode of The Fairly Oddparents: Information StuporHighway.

I never used to think of the real-life mechanisms behind what powered my Yelp search for a nearby restaurant or my Instagram checkin.

However the internet is a deeply physical place. It exists. It is made of wires, blinking lights, large data centers. It exists, too, in satellites and even internet balloons hovering above us. For every click I make and every word I’ve typed while browsing the internet, there exists some hard drive where my information will forever be stored. Well, “forever” as in as long as the data center itself lasts.

There is an analog, one-to-one physical relationship involved in our internet presence.

This blog is meant to understand the internet as a tangible space; a “tangible net” if you will. It is meant to show the environmental impact of the internet, how it has literally shaped our world, and what we can consider while moving forward into increasingly uncharted territory post-internet. This blog is also meant to think about how the internet was structured and who it was/is “meant for” according to said structures.