0.30 As transparent as infrastructure: on the research of  (Page 3/13)

The infrastructure we know

How is traditional physical infrastructure paradigmatic for defining and turning to cyberinfrastructure? We are used to considering roads, sewers, and power as infrastructure and we have expectations about their funding and maintenance; how do those known types of infrastructure turn our imagination when it comes to virtual infrastructure?

Connections between, as in roads

Visible infrastructure like roads that make modern life possible seem an obvious candidate paradigm for what information infrastructure should be. When we buy a house, we expect the state to create and maintain the infrastructure that connects our house to others so we can walk or drive to and fro. We use the roads to move bits of physical stuff, including ourselves from our space to work, play and others, over roads. That’s what we pay taxes for.

By analogy, the Internet would seem to be a road system for moving virtual stuff, comparable to what we use for the physical stuff. Nicholas Negroponte in being digital played with this switch from atoms to bits. That the Internet was called the “Information Superhighway” in the 1980s and 90s developed the analogy. Al Gore is supposed to have promoted the view that just as his father, former US Senator Albert Gore, promoted the development of an interstate highway system, so he was a champion of the new Information Superhighway that would benefit commerce, education and communication. His signature initiative was, not surprisingly, called the “National Information Infrastructure.” Road jargon has woven itself thoroughly into network jargon with terms like “traffic” and “onramp.” The very visible and useful road system made a perfect analogy for explaining the invisible Internet and its need in the modern state to make connections. Who, after all, could imagine a state without roads?

Applying this infrastructure paradigm to research, we can see how infrastructure is the connective tissue maintained to allow us to collaborate and exchange information. Just as roads are absolutely necessary for movement and economic development, so are information highways needed for virtual movement and electronic business. You can also see where the articulation between infrastructure and research computing is located. The infrastructure connects researchers and other entities like corporations and governments. Anything that is needed to connect more than one person, project, or entity is infrastructure. Anything used exclusively by a project is not.

It is worth pointing out an important difference and that is that the Internet is, in fact, not run like the highway system. Governments do not maintain the Internet, though they regulate it; and despite all the talk about how it is a system designed to bypass interruption, certain larger ISPs like Cogent can effectively block others, leading to blackouts such as when, in March 2008, parts of Canada could not access parts of Sweden thanks to a commercial dispute between Cogent and Telia. See Singel, “ISP Quarrel Partitions Internet.” (External Link) .