On Sat, 28 May 2005, Sue Thomas wrote:
Hi Sue, a really good question. I have been thinking about this recently
in writing about traceroutes. The simple answer is that it goes into the
Internet cloud - hence the shorthand sketches used in technical book to
hide this problem. (See Jessie Scanlon's nice short article on this,
http://web.archive.org/web/20000816092658/http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,5466,00.html
)
To try to explain to students I always start by showing the Warriors of
the Net movie. They use a effective mechnical metaphor to show packets
moving and it very useful at one level. Movie is a free download from
http://www.warriorsofthe.net/
I have actually been conceptualising the packets beckoning their own space
into being as they move. I use Paul Virilio's term of 'trajective' to
describe the spaces in-between.
http://lingua.utdallas.edu/call/trajectory.html
cheers
martin
> I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Can anyone point me to research
> on the following question:
>
> If I throw a ball to you, we know that it passes through the air between us.
> (unless we are in a vacuum, in which case we would both be dead etc etc)
>
> Q: When a data packet 'travels' from one node to the next, does it pass
> through anything? What is between the nodes? I know transfer is very fast
> but nevertheless it is still transfer so there must be a point where it is
> in neither place so it must be somewhere else. Shouldn't it? Or have I
> misunderstood?
>
> All hypotheses welcome. Preferably those I can understand ;)
>
> Sue
>
> http://travelsinvirtuality.typepad.com
>
_________________________________________________________________________
martin dodge
cyber geography research
centre for advanced spatial analysis, university college london
gower street, london, wc1e 6bt, united kingdom
email: [log in to unmask] (remove the nospam bit)
http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk http://www.cybergeography.org
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