Watch a professor explain the internet’s series of subsea tubes in 101 seconds

As a Ph.D. student in film and media, Nicole Starosielski originally was interested in ways of documenting and exploring the oceans. “I was thinking about shark documentaries and remote-operated vehicles,” she tells UC Berkeley News.

But Starosielski’s academic adviser suggested something a bit less flashy: subsea internet cables.

“I thought, ‘That’s so boring,’” Starosielski recalls in this 101 in 101 video, a series from Berkeley that challenges professors and experts to condense their field of study into a mere 101 seconds.

Yet, Starosielski indulged her adviser and looked into the cables, which she learned carry over 99% of all internet traffic across the ocean. That number holds to this day. 

Starosielski is now a leading global expert on subsea networks and a professor in Berkeley’s Department of Film and Media. Undergraduate and graduate students from all over the world come to study oceanic cable networks with her. And studying this series of very small tubes has been far from boring.

As Starosielski points out in the video, satellite internet technology that beams information from Earth to space and back might get a lot of attention, but it’s not nearly as efficient as the web of fiber optic cables that shoot digital signals between continents at the speed of light. 

“Subsea cables are the state-of-the-art technology,” says Starosielski. But they’re largely invisible, parked on the ocean floor. 

Making the cables and their technology understood and more visible is what drives her work and teaching. 

“All of this affects how you get the media that you get, how fast it is, where it circulates, how you can communicate with your friends — and yet, it’s invisible,” she explains. “If you can’t know about it, you can’t change it. You can’t have a say in it. So you should probably care.”

To that end, Starosielski is leading and launching at Berkeley the Certificate in Global Digital Infrastructure, the first and only program of its kind in higher education. And she says the timing couldn’t be better.

“The internet’s infrastructure is caught up in the contemporary geopolitical situation, and if you want to understand what’s happening in tech and the economy today, you have to know the fundamentals of internet infrastructure,” she explains.

Watch to learn more about how a series of tubes at the bottom of the ocean makes our modern lives, and perhaps even this video, possible.

Watch more 101 in 101 videos featuring Berkeley faculty and experts here.