"A whole virtual network out there"
It's morning in Redmond, Washington. I was just watching CNN, and the anchor from New York was doing a story about the crisis in the Middle East. He was leading into a segment about videos that people are making and posting online — the sound of the air-raid sirens, a trip to a shelter, an explosion and its aftermath.
With a voice of slight amazement and disbelief, stumbling a little, he said to the correspondent, “It's like a … whole, virtual network out there.”
The correspondent humored him and did a little spot about YouTube videos from the Middle East. He said, soothingly, “These aren't getting thousands of hits, but they're getting hundreds. People are definitely interested.” He also noted that people were using cameras in their cellphones to capture video. “There are thousands of these things [devices] out there!” he said.
Yet another understanding of “network,” then — when a telco says it, they mean managed pipes; when an engineer says it, he means logical architecture; and when a TV news anchor says it, he means CNN. Those little videos are subversive.
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