Where the Cloud Rises from the Sea - Response
Where the Cloud Rises from the Sea - Ingrid Burrington
Area 1:
In this week's reading, Ingrid Burrington tells the story of a small coastal town in California that happens to host one of the sites in which a submarine fiber optic cable delivers internet access to the rest of the U.S. As irony would have it, this town has very few internet broadband connections due to being a rural area and lacking a potential return investment. In her article, Burrington goes on to explore the culture of this town and its history as it relates to the ISP industry and being generally connected through internet connection.
Area 2:
As I got further into this reading, I was amazed at how similar the situation of this town was to where I grew up in terms of the inner workings and politics of broadband connection. When I was a student at Hermiston High School, I had an internship with the school district's IT department, and I learned a lot about the behind-the-scenes of the town's internet connectivity. It turns out Hermiston was not a broadband anomaly, but rather a smaller piece of a larger puzzle.
Much like the area in this reading, Hermiston, when looked at a map of fiber optic cables, is a well-served area. At my old house, a fiber optic cable ran through the street in front of our sidewalk, and it was constantly being worked on. Because of this, you would think our area would have a healthy broadband connection, but I would eventually learn that those cables were part of a Charter Communications-sponsored initiative that ran a fraction of its bandwidth to the school district/general population and the majority of it to the local Amazon Data Center. This put the community's connection in a hard spot because Charter was taking resources from locally-owned internet providers while still not giving the general public the best service.
The question of whether not internet access should continue to stay privatized is an interesting one. On one hand, it leads to situations like this in which monopolies and uneven distribution form in a time when the internet is used for many aspects of people's lives. On the other, having the internet be a public good might stunt the upkeep of broadband connections in more impoverished areas.
Much like the area in this reading, Hermiston, when looked at a map of fiber optic cables, is a well-served area. At my old house, a fiber optic cable ran through the street in front of our sidewalk, and it was constantly being worked on. Because of this, you would think our area would have a healthy broadband connection, but I would eventually learn that those cables were part of a Charter Communications-sponsored initiative that ran a fraction of its bandwidth to the school district/general population and the majority of it to the local Amazon Data Center. This put the community's connection in a hard spot because Charter was taking resources from locally-owned internet providers while still not giving the general public the best service.
The question of whether not internet access should continue to stay privatized is an interesting one. On one hand, it leads to situations like this in which monopolies and uneven distribution form in a time when the internet is used for many aspects of people's lives. On the other, having the internet be a public good might stunt the upkeep of broadband connections in more impoverished areas.
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