Selling the Cloud Sublime - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 77

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C hapTer 3
s elling The C loud s uBliMe

Windows gives me the family nature never could.
—Television commercial for
the Microsoft cloud

How does a massive data factory give rise to the image of a cloud? Although
the metaphor of the cloud came up from time to time in early discussions
of computing at a distance, the immediate reason can be found in most
technical primers on the subject: the image of a cloud was used in diagrams
to describe the interconnected elements of a computer communications
network. With its start in the banality of a technical diagram, the image
of the cloud has grown to take on a richer aesthetic that corporate mar-
keting has taken the lead in building. To appreciate the signiicance of
cloud computing, it is important to go beyond what the many technical
topics describe to understand how it is being constructed in discourse
and sold to business, government, and individual consumers because these
too help to shape what cloud computing means. The materiality of the
cloud is not limited to data centers, computers, software, applications,
and data. It is also embodied in campaigns to remake the prosaic stuff
of engineering into the compelling aesthetic of the cloud. Just as it was
important to describe the technical, political, and economic dimensions
of cloud computing in the last chapter, it is also essential to examine how

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