Edmund X. DeJesus
BEING DIGITAL by Nicholas Negroponte, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN 0-679-43919-6, $23
As founder and director of MIT's Media Laboratory, Nicholas Negroponte has had a front-row seat at the conversion of reality into bit streams. In Being Digital, he shares his experiences, insights, and predictions. It's a well-written and engaging book, and if you see the irony in the medium being a book, yes, so does Negroponte.
His analysis of such digital developments as the Internet, cable TV, "digital convergence," computer interfaces, E-mail, CD-ROM, and multimedia will appeal to experts and novices alike. The expert will see many familiar themes that have been playing out in reality, but they're juxtaposed and extended in new ways. Negroponte plays with ideas and insights like gla
ss beads, stringing them together in ways that are suggestive, predictive, and creative. For the novice, I can imagine no more engaging tour guide of the digital technology of the early twenty-first century.
One of Negroponte's main messages is about the freedom of digital representations. This plays out in a number of phrases that pop up like slogans throughout the book. "Bits will be bits." "Information will win out." "Bits know no borders." In his view, there is a kind of Darwinian survival of the fittest, an inevitability to the current state and the future unfolding of technology.
Negroponte's predictions, woven throughout the book, may take five years or 50 years to realize, but there is little doubt that here is the shape--the outline, if not the detail--of the future. Anyone planning to live there should take a peek.
Converting Life Into Bits
