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Increasingly, Internet users are working "in the cloud" creating and sending data that isn't stored on local hard drives. It's easy to imagine our emails and photos swirling around in cyberspace without a physical home but that's not really how it works. Those files are still stored somewhere, but you can only find them if you know where to look.

In Tubes, journalist Andrew Blum goes on a journey inside the Internet's physical infrastructure to uncover the buildings and compounds where our data is stored and transmitted. Along the way, he documents the spaces where the Internet first started and the people who've been working to make the web what it is today.

Blum tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that the Internet can be thought of as three separate entities: data centers that store information, Internet exchange points where networks meet to exchange data with each other, and fiber-optic cables which connect all of the information traveling between cities and continents.

Blum calls these fiber-optic cables, many of which traverse the ocean bottom, the "most poetic places of the Internet."

"They're about the thickness of a garden hose and they're filled with handful of strands of fiber-optic cable," he says. "And light goes in one end of the ocean and out the other end of the ocean. And that light is accelerated along its journey by repeaters that look like bluefin tuna underwater."

The repeaters and the fiber-optic cables extend for thousands of miles below the ocean's surface, along the same routes where other telecommunication cables have been placed for decades. Blum, who watched one of the fiber-optic cables emerge from the sea in Lisbon, says the process hasn't changed much over the decades.

"I saw pictures from [a telegraph] museum in England where the pictures from 100 years earlier looked exactly the same," he says. "The Englishmen in their hats were watching the laborers digging in the wet trench, pulling the cables up. So the technology has changed but the culture hasn't changed and the points being connected haven't changed much."

Journalist Andrew Blum writes about architecture, design, technology, urbanism, art and travel. He lives in New York City.

Journalist Andrew Blum writes about architecture, design, technology, urbanism, art and travel. He lives in New York City.

In the States, many of the trans-Atlantic cables coming from Europe terminate in a Art Deco-style office building at 60 Hudson St. in New York City. More than 100 telecommunications companies have offices in the building, which contains more than 70 million feet of cable wire.

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The Internet: A Series Of 'Tubes' (And Then Some)