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Thank you everyone for some very useful answers. I'm enjoying working my way through them and hope to try out my synthesis on you to see what you think! best Sue -----Original Message----- From: martin dodge To: [log in to unmask] Sent: 5/30/2005 3:53 PM Subject: Re: [MAPPING-CYBERSPACE] Cyberspatial question for the holiday weekend 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/art icle/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 ________________________________________________________________________ __