![]() There is clear pleasure in the retrograde mode of mapping also reveals the actual distances that the physical substrate of the World Wide Web inhabits in so doing, and suggests that we would do well to remember the physical substrate by which the global financial economy is interlinked. If the map of the bridging of oceanic by sunken internet cables domesticizes the transcendence of distance through the increasing interconnectedness of information flows. And it takes the notion of the electronic frontier seriously, by seeking to orient viewers to the new mental space that such sunken data lines create. Rather than naturalize an image of high-speed connections, the clever choice to rehabilitate a slightly romanticized earlier mapping of oceanic expanse suggests the new space of online data. The retro iconography of a chat channels the very claims of modernity that TeleGeography, a global telecom, pioneered to channel information–and done so by familiarizing viewers with a distinctly concept of space by how we are increasingly interlinked on information highways often concealed far beneath the sea. And the rapidity with which further cable is being lain to link the world’s data flows along faster and more secure lines of communication mirrors global interconnectedness–senses of connectivity and warping past concepts of proximity, unifying the differently owned cables.Ĭonjuring of a surprising antiquated format of charting coyly suggests the increasing interconnectivity of the Information Age, and it also channels the extreme novelty of being interlinked. They provide an image of global networking as well as offering the most massive engineering feat on earth that is hidden to human sight–and are more an emblem of globlization, in many ways, than the contraction of global space. The spans of privately funded fiber optic undersea cables that have been lain across oceans floors, some stretching over 28,000 kilometers, are a literalization of global circumnavigation. And the raptures into which the transatlantic cable set the poet who so desired worldly unity in 1858 saw the miracle of allowing the world to “reason together” “without the aid of palpable agencies” suggests a fascinating promotion of a discourse network uniting Old and New Worlds whose map was aptly chosen by Telegeography as a harbinger of a new horizon of information exchange in the twenty-first century. by man’s inventive power” as a sublime achievement. ![]() The globalization avant la letter that Whitman celebrated the “grandeur of this creates achievement of the Nineteenth Century” for confirming the “practicality of communicating across the Atlantic,” on the eve of America’s Civil War, was a triumphant enterprise whose “immensity” threw cold water on doublers was cast in disturbingly radicalized terms, to be sure, as a bond that liberalized a bond by which “Saxon extends the hand of amity to Saxon,” of an “all-conquering race that is always progressing and extending its power and influence, whether in the icy Arctic and Antarctic or in the tropical heats of India” by “lighting flashes from shore to shore: Whitman sung the “chord of communication” that would “vibrate forever with the peaceful messages of commernse, the lightning-winged words of the press, and the thousand anxious queries of individual affection to the health and happiness of the absent and the loved” in the Brooklyn Daily Times, as an ethnic triumphalism that “conquered time and space. ![]() “At last the great problem is solved,” Walt Whitman wrote in celebration of the achievement of the laying of the Atlantic Telegraph enterprise as a precedent that “set all doubts are forever at rest as to the practicability of spanning the world with telegraph wire–of joining Europe, Asia, Africa, America and Australia toegether by electric current.” Ocean floor mapping had barely begun when the first cable was laid underneath the Atlantic, connecting England to the United States by being painstakingly laid by throwing thousands of kilometers of telegraph cable overboard ships from wooden beams loaded with cable, moving from the middle of the Atlantic in two opposite directions, to create a subaquatic bridge of metal wire, by 1858. For such cables underlie the increasing notion of geographical proximity we experience daily, from the world of big finance to mundane online transactions. As we attempt to navigate the ever-expanding seas of data in the information economy, we can overlook the extent to which data streams run underneath the world’s seas to create a quite concrete sense of the interlinked. ![]()
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