Copper cables, emails and cat memes: What makes the internet the internet?

How do you picture the internet? Last weekend, Hunter Vaughan travelled to March, Cambridgeshire to explore this question with the local community.

As part of the Cambridge Creative Encounters public engagement initiative, I travelled with a small group from Cambridge Creative Encounters to March to set up for a community outreach day at the famous March Library. 

An hour’s drive into the fens from Cambridge, I arrived with an assortment of tools and talking points to engage community members and library goers around ideas and imaginaries of the Internet. 

How do people picture the internet? 

How would they draw it? 

We provided paper, pencils, and magic markers for this.

“We spoke at length about the material construction of the Internet, from the data centres that store and send out digital information, to the subsea and terrestrial cables that distribute this data”

Drawings ran a broad range, from furry kittens to abstract geometrical webs of connected points. I then handed them a tablet with the Telegeography interactive map visualising the subsea telecommunication cable so that they could see the cartography of the global Internet’s circulatory system, including how their own home isle is connected to other parts of the world. 

I provided coaxial cables and fibre optic cables so that they could feel the materiality of the Internet, and snapped one coaxial in half so that they could see the copper innards that delivers their emails, power bills, and cat memes.

We spoke at length about the material construction of the Internet, from the data centres that store and send out digital information, to the subsea and terrestrial cables that distribute this data. 

We discussed the historical materiality of Internet cables’ predecessors, used to expand colonial power through global telegraph networks, and the remnants of electronic communications and marine shipping in today’s Internet mapping, as well as how the proliferation of certain geographical focuses reveal 21st-century shifts on global power and economics.

Response was emphatic and engaged, and I embarked on long and poignant discussions of the benefits and dangers of digital culture and constant connectivity. Library goers were knowledgeable of basic social and psychological pitfalls of screen addiction and digital dependency, and were intrigued to hear of studies that have explored such threats.

I was grateful for their curiosity and bowled over by their articulateness (something that is a daily joy being an American amongst silver-tongued Brits), and learned much from them regarding how the devices and practices of connected life affect them and their families. 

Included into a group of tables that also featured beaded bracelet crafting for communicating DNA and genetics information, rocks and plants for poetry, and a Shakespearean diorama to be populated by drawn visions of the magician archetype, it was in all a fun and enlightening endeavour all around. 

Read more about Hunter’s work