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CrowdScience: What is the weight of the internet?

Discussion & Talk

What is the weight of the internet?

18/08/2023 GMT

BBC World Service - CrowdScience, What is the weight of the internet?

How do we go about trying to weigh the internet – what even counts as part of it?

Simple question, tricky answer. CrowdScience tries to weigh the internet, but what is it? Just the electrons in the wires, or do we add modems, data centres, satellites, even us?

How do you think about the internet? What does the word conjuror up? Maybe a cloud? Or the flashing router in the corner of your front room? Or this magic power that connects over 5 billion people on all the continents of this planet? Most of us don’t think of it at all, beyond whether we can connect our phones to it.  

CrowdScience listener Simon has been thinking and wants to know how much it weighs. Which means trying to work out what counts as the internet. If it is purely the electrons that form those tikitok videos and cat memes, then you might be surprised to hear that you could lift of the internet with 1 finger. But presenters Caroline Steel and Marnie Chesterton argue that there might be more, which sends them on a journey.  

They meet Andrew Blum, the author of the book Tubes – Behind the Scenes at the Internet, about his journey to trace the physical internet.  And enlist vital help from cable-loving analyst Lane Burdette at Telegeography, who maps the internet.  

To find those cables under the oceans, they travel to Porthcurno, once an uninhabited valley in rural Cornwall, now home to the Museum of Global Communications thanks to its status as a hub in the modern map of worldwide communications. With the museum’s Susan Heritage-Tilley, they compare original telegraph cables and modern fibre optics.  

The team also head to a remote Canadian post office, so correspondent Meral Jamal can intercept folk picking up their satellite internet receivers, and ask to weigh them. A seemingly innocuous question becomes the quest for everything that connects us, and its weight! 

Producer: Marnie Chesterton
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton & Caroline Steel
Editor: Richard Collings
Production Coordinator: Jonathan Harris

(Image: Scales with data worlds and symbols interspersed throughout. Credit: Getty Images)

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