Nicole Starosielski was working on her doctorate in film and media studies at UC Santa Barbara when her advisor suggested she do her thesis on undersea cables. All she could think of was telegraph cables, which sounded ancient and irrelevant to her. “I was like, this is so boring. I’m never going to get a job.”
Then she went down the proverbial rabbit hole.
Twenty years later, Starosielski is a professor of film and media studies at Berkeley and the creator of a first-of-its-kind certificate program and minor in global digital infrastructure, an interdisciplinary exploration of the physical plumbing—including undersea cables—that makes our “cloud-based” internet and “wireless” communications possible.
These systems are unseen and out of mind for the vast majority of us. We wanted to make them visible, so we asked her to walk us through the steps involved in something as seemingly simple as sending an email.
As you follow the journey, keep in mind the humans who build, install, and maintain the networks and machinery we take for granted. As Starosielski said on our podcast, The Edge, “I think the fantasy is, it’s in a cloud, and nobody lives there. But there are so many people in the cloud.”
↓ Scroll down to view our illustrated feature on an email’s odyssey.
